


Snow Hare

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [17]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: And just dogs dogs, Gen, I went to see the snow y'all and this is the result, Road Trips, Service Dogs, Snow and Ice, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-19 13:49:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22111882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Halfway through the night, Angel and Louis were abruptly woken up by Red’s dark shape stomping out to the top of the stairs in a huge bathrobe and shouting, “Stop. Having. Fun,” down them.He got no reply. He didn’t wait for one, either. He just flounced back to his room.“Did that just happen?” Louis whispered after a moment.“I think it did,” Angel whispered back.(Team Red extended takes a vacation.)
Relationships: Eleanor Camacho & Wade Wilson, Matt Murdock & Peter Parker & Wade Wilson, Matt Murdock & Samuel Chung, Peter Parker & the copycats
Series: Inimitable Verse [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1117746
Comments: 93
Kudos: 734





	1. get on the plane

**Author's Note:**

> I went to the snow.  
> I liked it.  
> I fell in it.  
> I am now writing about it.

**DD:** hello everyone this is Foggy. I need to know everything about your lives, specifically your flights, so that SOMEONE will stop asking me the same five questions about each of you individually.

 **BT:** you know mine

 **DD:** yes sam I know yours. And your work schedule. But did you write that in where I told you to?

 **BT:** yes

 **DD:** fascinating how it appeared on my google doc just now

 **SM:** which google doc???

 **S2:** the one from Thursday yes?

 **DD:** among you there are two people who can follow instructions. Thank you Angel, you are one of them.

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : Did I get a hard answer on the Ellie situ?

 **S4:** My dad says NO ☹

 **S2:** Try your mom

 **S4:** My mom says YES 😃

 **S2:** now go pack and put everything you got by the door and wait until your dad gets home. Works every time.

 **S4:** does not

 **S4:** Parents have spoken. Mom says no now toooooooo ☹

 **DD:** sorry miles maybe next time

 **SM:** SAM

 **BT:** PETER

 **SM:** SNOW

 **BT:** I KNOW. I’ve made a battery!!

 **DD:** which we are not bringing across state lines

 **SM:** what parts do you need?

 **DD:** none because it isn’t coming. Samuel, your employer is cooing at the cats next door again. Go shame him. The rest of you. Info. I’m begging you. Wade, it is a yes on Ellie, we got a seat.

 **D2:** Sorry guys can’t go. Gym has been hit by the flu. every shift is now my shift

 **S3:** I took a few days off work. I think Spidey and I are on the same flight (pray for me). Depart La Guardia at 7:35.

 **S2:** Oh my god that’s MY flight too

 **DD:** convenient. Thank you. So Angel’s info is all three of your info. Good to know. Peter, do you remember how to get to our place? If not, I’ll send Matt and Kirsten.

 **BT:** Or me and you could go?

 **DD:** I thought we’d sworn off BART?

 **BT:** oh we have.

 **DD:** do you not see a problem with this plan then?

 **BT:** no

 **DD:** so I’ll be sending Matt and Kirsten to pick you guys up. Wade, are you leaving at 7:35 or is that not optimal Ellie hours?

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : we are leaving at 2 fucking am pal. There are no optimal Ellie hours.

 **S3:** sorry I’m out of the loop. Who’s ellie?

 **S2:** ^

 **SM:** my niece

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : my daughter

 **S3:** WHAT

 **S2:** WHAT

 **D2:** WADE WHAT

 **DD:** Matt wants to know if she likes capri-sun.

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : She’s only drinking red liquids rn.

 **DD:** Matt wants to know if he has permission to feed her unsweetened cranberry/pomegranate juice

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : full permission granted

 **S2:** wade how long have you had a daughter???

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : she’s six. So six years

 **SM:** has she ever seen snow? Like not just city snow? Real snow??

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : No, but I guarantee you that she will try to eat it.

 **D2:** that’s so cute.

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : yeah we’ll be getting in at 8 something.

 **DD:** cool. You and Clint should be getting in around the same time then. Maybe even the same flight.

 **SM:** I’m sorry barton?? Clint Barton??

 **DD:** yes

 **SM:** why, praytell, is the abominable hawkeye joining us??

 **DD:** because tues and hazel miss their friend and Matt misses his.

 **SM:** he and matt aren’t friends

 **SM:** They have a dumpster feud

 **DD:** friends.

 **SM:** is kate coming on this adventure??

 **DD:** did she not tell you this?

 **SM:** NO.

 **DD:** oh. Well Kate and Clint are accompanying us. Think of it as a triple mentor-mentee experience, Pete.

 **SM:** WHO DO I BELONG TO???

 **S3:** wade

 **S2:** wade

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : me

 **SM:** YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD

 **DP (´** **｡** **✪ω** **✪** **｡´)** : YOU’RE NOT MY REAL SON

 **BT:** I love this

 **BT:** But I just looked Foggy and the BART schedule’s changed soooooo

 **DD:** goddamnit. Okay. Thank you all for your basic information. We will see you shortly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit, it is part of the rail system we use in the bay area.


	2. get out of the driveway

Angel never got to go places between work and work and school and Spiderman, so this was an adventure of the highest degree. Alma sat on her bed and made dry sobbing noises as she stuffed her bag full of clothes. Spidey had told her to prepare to be both hotter and colder than she expected.

She couldn’t wait to see him fall down the side of the mountain.

He would absolutely take Sam down with him.

They would all 100% at some point be sat on the side of the road waiting for emergency services.

“I wanna _come_ ,” Alma moaned into her pillows.

“Spidey invited me, not you,” Angel snapped at her. “You gotta wait to be invited to things.”

“No one invites me anywhere,” Alma whined.

“That’s ‘cause you’re like, nine. In ten years, you’ll be invited places. You gotta get cool first,” Angel told her.

“I _am_ cool. It’s you who’s not cool.”

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Pass the socks.

Spidey was waiting for her and Louis at the airport looking for all intents and purposes like he’s rolled out of bed into a pile of winter clothes. He was sleeping standing up with a cup of coffee held out perfectly balanced in his hand.

Spidey would sacrifice caffeine for no man. Not even himself.

Angel walked up and waited next to his open-mouthed form, rocking back and forth on her toes, until she caught sight of Louis waving at her across the platform.

He came over and appraised Spidey’s continued lack of movement.

“You think we can get him through security like this?” Louis asked.

“We’ll just put him on the belt,” Angel said.

Spidey snapped awake and doused himself in coffee like a pro right before they got into the TSA line. The TSA were immediately disgusted with him. He apologized to everyone around him for like, half an hour, before they were freed from the scrutiny of the blue suits and were allowed into the airport itself.

Spidey took the time to go change into something less fragrant and wet while Louis tried on all the neck pillows in the souvenir shops for Angel’s viewing pleasure.

They got on the plane.

Spidey was in the aisle seat. A child in the opposite aisle seat screamed bloody murder until he looked at it and held out his arms. The man no longer holding his daughter apologized to Spidey for the two minutes it took for this little girl to settle down. She was adorable. Her name was Mariella and she introduced Angel to all her My Little Ponies over the back of Spidey’s seat.

Her auntie lived in California and she was going to go see the fish in the big fish tank at the beach.

Louis made sounds like he was dying against the window seat.

Louis told Angel over the man sleeping between them that he would do anything for a daughter.

“I’m gonna find my girl. I’m gonna get married, and then I’m gonna have six kids,” he said seriously.

“That’s a fuckload of kids,” Angel pointed out.

“Angel, this is my destiny,” Louis told her. “You can’t question people’s destinies.”

Angel leaned forward around Spidey’s seat and jabbed him in the side.

“Huh?”

“Are you gonna have a billion babies with MJ and Ned?” she asked.

Spidey had a plastic spoon crammed in his mouth from his breakfast yogurt cup. He chewed it slowly while staring at her.

“Imma do what?” he asked.

“Have babies. A billion of ‘em,” Angel repeated for him.

“Do I look like parent material, girl?” he demanded around the spoon and the kid walking ponies up his shoulder.

“Yes,” she said.

Spidey scoffed.

Angel was watching The Bourne Ultimatum when the captain announced that they’d be landing soon.

She hadn’t seen any of the Bourne movies, so watching this one was pretty wild. Spidey was watching Phineas and Ferb in front of her with Mariella. Louis had fallen asleep on the shoulder of their suspended-state seat mate. He snapped awake when the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom and wiped drool off his cheek, then panicked upon realizing that he needed to wipe it off their neighbor’s shoulder without waking him or embarrassing himself.

Angel looked away.

It was only polite.

They landed in San Francisco.

It was nice fucking airport, man. Fuck. Angel felt like her money wasn’t going so far in this place. She resisted the urge to buy a pack of M&Ms. Spidey reached over her head and nabbed the bag on the way to buy his own snack.

He crammed it into her hand on the way out of the shop with a new yogurt spoon in his mouth. He was occasionally nice like that.

Mr. Nelson was waiting for them with Sam, even though Angel had been pretty damn sure that their assigned pick-up team was supposed to be Red and Ms. McDuffie.

This spoke ominously of the rest of the journey.

Sam and Spidey flew into each other’s arms like long-lost lovers. Mr. Nelson watched that, rolling his eyes, and welcomed Angel and Louis with a hug. He looked weird. He was wearing a beanie and he smelled like something spicy.

He seemed a teeny bit less skinny than he had at his wedding, if a thousand times more scruffy.

Spidey crushed him in a hug when he and Sam were done being dramatic with each other.

Mr. Nelson patted awkwardly at Spidey’s back to let him know that his lungs were deflating, but Spidey didn’t notice for a good ten seconds.

“Where’s the old guy and Kirsten?” he asked when Mr. Nelson had finally caught his breath.

“Oh, you know. Corrupting the youth and begging off for a twisted ankle,” Mr. Nelson said.

“Boss likes Ellie better than me,” Sam said with a huge pout.

“Matt took Ellie to the park to let her work out her wiggles so she won’t try to bite y’all when we get in,” Mr. Nelson said.

“ _I_ don’t get to go to the park,” Sam said sadly.

Mr. Nelson ignored him.

“San Francisco is so wide,” Angel whispered to Louis on the train that Sam called ‘light rail hell.’ He’d crammed himself into a corner with enormous headphones on and had an arm looped through Mr. Nelson’s. Louis was watching him in concern.

Or he did until the whole carriage started shrieking. Then Louis flinched and started looking around to find the source of the horrendous noise.

They both turned towards Mr. Nelson but he was just? Chillin’? Like nothing was even happening?

Dude.

Spidey grimaced and put hands over his ears.

“It was like this last time,” he told Mr. Nelson over the screech.

“Hm?”

“I said, it was like this last time.”

“Oh, no. It’s like this all the time,” Mr. Nelson said. “The new ones are quieter.”

Sam, Angel realized, was counting minutely with a single hand.

They went into a tunnel.

The other side of the tunnel exploded with a saturated, green world lined with pastel houses, all with steps leading up to them and ornate metal screen doors outside them. The houses were tall without looking tall. The hills they were set upon were at odds with their horizontal bases. It was as though everyone was collectively pretending that they lived on a flat street.

And oh god, the beanies. The beanies and the booties and the cuffed jeans.

They were everywhere.

With novelty socks.

And highlighter colored windbreakers.

Lord help this city’s style.

“I can’t decide if I’m under or overdressed,” Louis said as they transferred from the blue train to the pink-red train that screamed in its own special way.

“I think that’s the point,” Angel decided, settling in to watch an army of sweatpant-wearing kids with severe buns on the tops of their heads file into the train with them. Mr. Nelson didn’t react to them. He just stepped back and took Sam with him.

Angel and Louis crunched in together at the back of the train in front of the city map. It seemed safest.

They got off in a colorful neighborhood called the Castro. It was decorated by rainbow flags ever which way you looked.

From this Angel deduced that she was among her people.

She made Louis take five pictures of her in front of all the various flags until Mr. Nelson told them to cross the damn street already.

He was a New Yorker at heart.

It was hilarious that he was out here, masquerading as one of these West Coast hippies.

They got on a bus which was to take them to where Mr. Nelson and Red lived. He explained that they lived just outside one of the edges of Golden Gate Park.

Sam claimed that he lived in a dumpster along the way.

He was scolded.

He really lived downstairs from Red and Mr. Nelson. His roommate down there with him was convinced that he was Red and Mr. Nelson’s adopted son and kept directing opinions over his behavior upstairs to the old guys who were like, ‘Kay? Sure?’

Sam started to explain that he was concocting an elaborate story in this guy’s head about how Red had left him in New York with his mother when he was mere weeks old and had so been a weekend father for most of Sam’s tragic childhood until recently, when they’d reconnected over a mutual interest in law.

He only started this story because Mr. Nelson warned him of the consequences of finishing it and they included the story being reported to Red and restricted time with Tuesday.

Sam called him heartless.

He abandoned his elbow for Spidey’s.

They tumbled off the bus and hiked up a couple of blocks to the door of a tall green house with white trimmings. Sam scrambled away from them and they all watched him hop the fence and then heard him take what were presumably stairs up the back way.

“Um?” Louis said.

“He’s trying to sneak up on Matt,” Mr. Nelson sighed, shaking his head.

A yelp rang out.

“It never works,” Mr. Nelson hummed. “Has never worked. Will never work, but bless him, he keeps—”

An army of dogs started barking in the house.

“—trying.”

“HEY. Settle. _HAZEL_. Settle, you menace—you settle, too, Samuel, you terror. Where is your guide? What part of ‘stay with your guide’ did you miss? It is four words. Do I need to take it to two?”

Well, there was Red up there. Bossy as ever.

Bossier, perhaps, since it was his house, his dogs, and his apprentice.

Mr. Nelson herded everyone up the steps and unlocked the door.

It was a nice house. Not super fancy. Hardwood floors in old wood. Mismatching furniture here and there. There was another set of stairs that led up to the top floor which opened out into a kitchen immediately.

A tall blond man was in there, leaning on the counter, looking through a doorway into what appeared to be a living room, also with hardwood floors, but with the addition of Red leaning halfway out a window.

He hauled Sam in off the roof and turned around to reveal himself wearing gray jeans (cuffed, of course. He lived in the land of hipsters) and a zip-up hoodie with the number 63 over his heart. It was orange. It didn’t suit him, but by god, he was wearing it and a green flannel underneath it.

Angel had questions for this new world of fashion.

“Hey Clint,” Mr. Nelson greeted Hawkeye in the kitchen. “You get some sleep?”

Hawkeye was way too tall for this kitchen, but he was cool about it.

“Got enough,” he said. “Kate’s checking into the Airbnb now, so I’ll leave y’all before your house gets too crazy.”

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” Mr. Nelson said. “Your dog, on the other hand, is a different story.”

Hawkeye barked a laugh.

“I’ll get him out of your hair,” he promised. “He’s just excited to have friends. Hey, ‘sup, Pete? Stark told me you put out a wildfire?”

Spidey’s face glazed over for a second.

“It was only two stories,” he said, snapping out of it. “He’s talkin’ me up.”

“Still impressive, kiddo,” Hawkeye said with a grin.

Spidey didn’t like compliments. He never did. He blazed past this one by wriggling past Mr. Nelson and going into the living room to demand a hug from Red. Red patted at him and sniffed at him and asked him why the fuck he smelt like old coffee.

He said he bathed in it now, hadn’t he heard? It was the latest thing.

Red told him to go take a shower.

Red and Mr. Nelson were surprisingly cordial hosts. They had a guest bedroom for some folks to sleep in, a pull-out bed in their sofa, and Sam had some space in his room for someone if they didn’t mind sharing a tiny bed.

He and Spidey decided they were going to have a slumber party.

Red told them that they had one night and one night only to get their combined chaos energy out because he was not putting up with any chaos energy in the fucking snow.

Sam told Red that he couldn’t come on the trip then.

Sam was manhandled down the stairs. Red came back up and said that he was in time out. He asked if anyone wanted to join him.

Angel almost put up her hand, but Louis gave her a Look.

She stuffed it into her pocket and opted for the shit-eating grin instead.

Sam came scrambling up five minutes later and he and Red played this game twice more before Red threw up his hands and said he was done with this bullshit and was going to go have a drink. He made Hawkeye join him before he left.

“Where’s Wade?” Spidey asked Mr. Nelson as they pulled down things for drinks from the cabinets.

They had a lot of different kinds of whiskey.

Angel didn’t know much about whiskey, but she knew when what she was looking at was shit and half of this stuff was shit.

Weren’t lawyers supposed to drink the nice stuff?

“Not sure. Hey, babe?” Mr. Nelson called. “Where’s Wade?”

Spidey mimed puking at the petname. It was hard not to giggle.

"He took Ellie to pick out some snacks for tomorrow,” Red called back. “They’re just around the corner, they’ll be back soon.”

Mr. Nelson gestured his way for Spidey’s edification.

“Have you seen Ellie lately, Pete?” he added. “She’s huge. Last we saw her, she was what? Three? Four?”

Spidey offered Angel a tall glass with a red lip. She took it and Mr. Nelson took it immediately from her to drop ice into it.

“I saw her last year a couple times,” Spidey said. “Seems like she had a rough year.”

“Yeah, that’s what Wade was sayin’. I guess there was some problems with her foster folks for a while. Had to do some juggling,” Mr. Nelson said. “She’s in pretty good spirits now, though. Was pretty happy before I left anyways, and that was going on 12 hours with no sleep. Wade’s exhausted,” he chuckled.

Angel tried to imagine Wade exhausted. The only time she’d seen him super miserable was that last summer during the heatwave.

She’d never seen someone so unprepared to cope with New York summers. And he somehow had lived in the city for years.

Spidey said that even Wade couldn’t be prepared for everything.

Sam re-emerged from his final bout of time-out downstairs about halfway through drink-making and decided that what everyone really wanted in their drinks was a load of ginger ale.

Mr. Nelson told him that sometimes people didn’t want ginger ale.

This was a foreign concept to Sam.

He took a poll. No one had it in their hearts to disagree with him and so the results he presented to Mr. Nelson led him to relent.

Everyone’s drinks were now sharp on ginger. It was kind of okay?

Red slipped in and stole his and Hawkeye’s whiskey before it was contaminated by bubbly spice.

Never to fear, though. Sam was a mobile beast. They all heard Red and Hawkeye repeatedly declining the offer of ginger ale in the other room.

It was hard not to giggle again.

Around then, there was a knock at the door and a shrill little voice cried, “Uncle Foggy, we’re back!”

The dogs went wild. A wave of blond and red beasts swept through the kitchen to clatter their nails at the door. Hazel lost her damn mind and barked like someone was wielding a flame thrower on the other side.

This house was full of scolding.

Sam scolded the dogs. Mr. Nelson scolded the dogs. Red sighed in the other room and mumbled unkind things about the dogs behind their backs.

Eventually a path to the door was cleared and it was opened to reveal a tiny little girl with a tan skin and a ponytail, clutching several plastic bags to her chest. Wade’s huge bulk stood behind her in a wind breaker with a grocery bag on his hip.

He wasn’t wearing his mask and his skin looked gray around his eyes.

“No!” the tiny girl snipped at the dogs when she tottered in. “Not for puppies! Snacks for people!”

“Snacks for people,” Wade repeated sagely as he closed the door behind him.

“And bears!” the girl said, whipping around with a huge grin.

Wade studied her.

“No bears,” he said.

“Bears,” she hummed to herself happily. She crammed the snacks closer in to her chest. “Going on a bear hunt!”

“We’re not hunting bears, bubba,” Wade said.

“We’re not scared!” his kid sang. “Uncle Red! Uncle Red! We’re not—TIO.”

“’Sup, baby girl?” Spidey said.

Wade’s kid screamed and threw the snacks down to tackle him.

Angel and Sam dove for the snacks before the dogs got to them. They piled them safely on the counter. Wade set his grocery bag next to them. He ruffled Angel’s hair.

“Good to see you, kiddo,” he told her. “Y’all have a decent flight? ‘Cause we didn’t.”

“We didn’t!” Wade’s daughter announced to Spidey. “It was bad, Tío! We got stuck in the airport for _hours_.”

“Delayed for an hour,” Wade corrected.

“It was a long hour,” Hawkeye said, reappearing in the kitchen with Red at his shoulder.

“It was a _million years_ ,” Wade’s daughter explained to Spidey. “And then the guy next to me and Dad on the plane puked! All! Over! Dad!”

They all looked at Wade.

“It was my face,” he said. “It happens.”

“And then a guy drank a whole lot of little bottles and yelled at a plane lady,” Wade’s daughter expounded. “And then a guy got stuck in the bathroom and yelled a lot.”

“This was the same guy,” Hawkeye told the rest of them. “And to be fair, the best part of the flight was him being locked in there.”

“Noisy,” Wade’s daughter told Spidey.

“I’ll bet,” Spidey said. “Hey, you wanna meet me and Dad’s friends? The other Spideys?”

Wade’s kid turned and stared right at Angel and Louis.

She had Wade’s eyes.

“No,” she said. “I’m good.”

“I’m so proud. God, I’m so proud,” Red mumbled, leaving everyone in the kitchen again.

“Are you sure?” Spidey asked, making nervous, apologetic faces at Angel and Louis.

“Yeah,” Wade’s kid said. “I know enough people already.”

Red cackled in the other room.

“The _dream_ ,” he said to no one in particular in there.

“I’ll drink to that,” Hawkeye said.

He left to go join Red.

“How about you say hi anyways?” Spidey offered. “It’s polite.”

“Ellie,” Wade warned in a terrifyingly dad voice.

Ellie pouted and crossed her arms to make sure everyone knew she was doing it.

“Alright,” she said. “But not ‘cause I want to.”

Red sounded like he was dying in the other room. Angel thought she could just make out him wheezing ‘I love her so much, Clint. I love her _so much._ ’

It figured the only kid he’d like would be Wade’s weird one.

“This is Angel,” Spidey said, pointing at her. “She’s the pink Spidey. You and her are upsettingly similar. And this is Louis. He’s the Spidey everyone thinks I am. You and him could not be more different.”

Ellie stared up at Angel with serious eyes. She stuck out a hand.

Angel contained herself and shook it with the same gravitas.

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

“I like pink,” Ellie said. “You can stay.”

She turned to Louis and squinted hard.

“I don’t like tall people, though,” she said, “You have to go.”

Ellie was a hoot and a half and it was clear from Wade’s increasing quietness that when they were together, she required his complete and total attention.

She’d ranked the dogs.

She’d then ranked her uncles.

And then she’d insisted that everyone put something red in their drinks. No, she did not care what. An umbrella. A straw. Some cranberry juice, whatever.

She slipped a pair of gummy lips from one of the snack packs into Wade’s can of beer and Wade watched her do it and drank it anyways while staring her dead in the eye.

This was a challenge to Ellie.

She crammed three more sets of lips in that can and found a bag of pink Pop Rocks in one of the kitchen drawers which she aptly applied to the situation.

Wade drank the foaming, gushing, disgusting mess without batting an eye.

This so infuriated Ellie that she announced she was going to bed.

“She’s a real doll, Wilson,” Hawkeye said after the huffing had moved into the guestroom.

“Takes after her mama,” Wade said, listening carefully. As soon as the door closed, he stood up and dumped his whole can down the kitchen sink's drain.

“She’s gonna love the snow,” Hawkeye said.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Wade said. “She’s half Latina, half Canadian. Now’s our shot to see how the genes split up.”

Hawkeye snorted. Then hauled himself up.

He wasn’t staying at the Daredevil house. He was staying with his apprentice/mentee gal, who Spidey had earlier pronounced a ‘monumental dick.’

“I’ll see you guys bright and early,” he said.

“Just how bright and early are we talkin’?” Wade asked once Red had walked Hawkeye out.

Mr. Nelson raised an eyebrow at him.

Halfway through the night, Angel and Louis were abruptly woken up by Red’s dark shape stomping out to the top of the stairs in a huge bathrobe and shouting, “Stop. Having. _Fun_ ,” down them.

He got no reply. He didn’t wait for one, either. He just flounced back to his room.

“Did that just happen?” Louis whispered after a moment.

“I think it did,” Angel whispered back.

She and Louis woke up at 6am. Not because they’d set an alarm, rather because a torrent of fur scrambled past them and shuddered down the stairs at break-neck speed.

This was followed by Red making grumpy old-man sounds in the kitchen.

Mr. Nelson told him to keep his voice down, but that was it, really.

The living room was officially awake.

Within seconds, the downstairs was awake, too. The scratching and barking was met by Sam’s hoarse gushing down there and a beat or two later, the dogs came rushing back up with Sam patting at the wall blearily behind them.

He hadn’t put in his contacts yet. His eyes looked a little eerie all black like that. It was like he didn’t have any at all.

“I’m comin’,” he grumbled when Hazel came hurrying back to stick her nose into his hand. “Look, the Ancient One’s right _there_ , Haze. He’ll feed you. Christ.”

Tuesday came over and wagged her tail. Sam squinted hard at her.

“Oh,” he said. “Now, _you’re_ different. Come here, precious. Imma feed you. Where are your treats?”

The discrimination against Hazel was unreal among these people.

“No treats,” Red said wearing what Angel now saw to be a huge velvety red bathrobe with the word ‘Noncompliant’ embroidered lovingly on the back.

Mr. Nelson sipped coffee and didn’t mention it. Angel got the feeling that he, like Red, had a bit of a mean streak in him. He was just quieter about it.

“Why no treats?” Sam asked, petting at Tuesday’s head and squinting at Red like he was a mile away instead of ten feet.

“Because she’ll get carsick. You know, like you,” Red said. “No treats. For either of you, at least until we get to the lake.”

Sam pouted.

“I’m a grown-ass man, I’ll have treats if I so want them,” he huffed.

Red poured a cup of coffee judgmentally. Mr. Nelson took a long sip from his own mug.

Sam scowled.

“I’m leaving, I’m not wanted here,” he declared, turning just in time to collide with Ellie, adorned in pink Hello Kitty pajamas. She had kitten-feet slippers.

“IT’S MORNING,” she cried. The dogs shrunk back around Red’s knees. Sam winced.

“It is, indeed,” Red said.

“WE’RE GOIN’ ON A BEAR HUNT,” Ellie elaborated.

“Who’s the bear?” Red asked.

Ellie stared at him.

“Daddy?” She tried.

Red made an ‘ehn, alright’ expression.

Mr. Nelson left the kitchen.

Angel and Louis were tasked with dragging Spidey out of bed. No one wanted to because he was known to punch people if poked out of a dead sleep.

Sam couldn’t make him out in his own bed without some serious lighting, though, so he was excused from the task. He took the dogs out to feed them on the deck with Ellie following him to supervise. Red went to go get punched in the face by Wade and his hair-triggered subconscious.

He accomplished this goal within seconds.

Hearing the resulting sound from that interaction did not fill Angel with confidence as she hiked down the stairs into Sam’s room.

Sam’s room was a shoebox that barely held a bed. It might have been larger if it wasn’t half workshop. He had lamps on every surface, including on the metal wire net that he’d set a couple feet down from the ceiling to create more storage space. The rest of the space was filled with the bed and a series of tables that appeared to be attached in steps along the sides of the wall. A couple of them were folded up flush against the wall. The rest had all kind of bits of metal all over them and blueprints of all sorts of things taped up above them.

Sam shrugged when Angel asked him what they were all for and just said, “You know. Stuff.”

Angel had the feeling that his real suit—the invisibility one that Spidey had mentioned a couple of times—was in there somewhere.

She wanted to see it.

Even if it was invisible, she wanted to see it. Or maybe touch it.

Sam didn’t mention it.

Nor did he mention the fact that he and Spidey—two grown men—had crammed in together in a twin-sized bed.

Like, Spidey wasn’t a big guy or anything, and neither was Sam by any stretch of the imagination, but that was kind of a stretch, even for her.

Unless they were both super cuddly or something.

Or you know.

Fucking.

Louis covered her mouth when she tried to ask. He said it wasn’t any of their business.

They decided that if two people touched Spidey at the same time, he’d get confused and only punch one of them. A two-man poke offered better odds of not getting punched than a coin flip, which would get one person definitely punched, so Angel was game to go along with this.

Spidey had nested nearly completely in Sam’s blue and white duvet. He had one visible shoulder and a small bit of back poking out from the blanket’s folds.

Angel and Louis row-sham-bowed for who got the shoulder.

Angel lost.

She wanted a redo, but Louis wasn’t the kind of guy to cheat, so she had to swallow it down.

They assumed the position.

On the count of three.

One, two—

No one got punched because someone upstairs dropped a glass and Spidey snapped awake.

Zero to sixty, this guy.

He didn’t even seem tired.

“What was that?” he asked.

Mr. Nelson was perched on the counter when the rest of them peeked upstairs. He had Ellie on his lap.

Ellie had her hands over her ears along with Mr. Nelson’s on top of them. Red had both dogs in hand right outside the kitchen.

“Sometimes we drop things,” Mr. Nelson sang. “And that’s okay.”

The sound of the vacuum finally shut off.

“That’s okay,” Ellie mumbled.

“Is it safe, Dad?” Mr. Nelson asked.

“Is it safe, Dad?” Ellie asked after him.

“It’s safe,” Wade said, standing up.

“It’s safe,” Ellie told Mr. Nelson.

“Okay, let’s watch our feet. Should we let the puppies go?” Mr. Nelson asked.

“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Sorry for breaking things.”

“It’s okay, hon. Matt’s been trying to break that bad boy for four years now,” Mr. Nelson said.

Red perked up and released the hounds.

“Was that the Colesons’ cup?” he asked.

“It sure was,” Mr. Nelson said a little smugly.

“Fuck _yes_ ,” Red said. “Ellie, you’re my favorite.”

Ellie perked up at that and kicked her slippered feet excitedly.

“I am?”

“Sure are,” Red said. “Just for that, you get shotgun.”

Wade thought not.

“What did the Colesons do?” Angel asked Sam while they all packed up the rental car a while later.

“I guess they were people Boss knew from church?” Sam said. “I think they tried to get him and their daughter to date a thousand times, so things got super uncomfortable ‘cause you know, Matt was married.”

“And he didn’t break it straight away?” Louis asked. “I would have “lost” it if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Sam said. “Matt’s got guilt problems. He’d rather just be mad at something than break it or chuck it if its still functional.”

And like?

Had he ever heard of this thing called donating?

“It’s the guilt, man,” Sam said. “He’s got a box with all the pictures and crafts the kids in Hell’s Kitchen have made for him at the old office and he won’t chuck any of that, even though it’s literally pipe-cleaners and macaroni, so I dunno.”

They couldn’t go yet, even though everything was ready. They had to wait for Hawkeye and Hawkeye and Lucky.

That was what people kept saying anyways.

Angel and Spidey knew what was really up here, though, and that was that they were waiting for Kate’s girlfriend, America Chavez.

Angel was gonna have a heart attack if she had to wait any longer.

The silver pick-up with a shell on its back half that pulled up against the curb brought her right to her feet.

The passenger door was kicked open and a woman with long black hair and a huge white, faux-fur scarf and sunglasses on leaned out seductively.

“Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Arachno-Ass.”

“Go fuck yourself, Kate,” Spidey called out the window.

“Having dreams out there?” Kate drawled with a pointed toe and raised knee.

She was shoved unceremoniously out of her seat.

Barton uncrumpled his body from the backseat of the pick-up to raucous laughter on the other side of the truck. He settled casually in Kate’s place, in her exact pose.

“Yoo-hoo, Redthew,” he drawled far less sexily.

Red shoved Spidey of the window and draped himself in it.

“Mr. Barton,” he said. “A good morning to you, too.”

“You wanna trade vehicles, big boy?” Barton asked.

“Not on your life, darling,” Red cooed. “I love it when your knees pop. So flexible. So talented.”

“You guys are disgusting,” Kate said, shoving herself up and shoving Barton back into the center console of the truck. “Get out here and give us your dogs, DD.”

Ah.

So _that_ was why they were waiting for the Hawkeyes.

America Chavez was too gorgeous and talented to be hauling dogs into a truck. She was allowed to baby talk them, that was allowed. That was encouraged, actually. But the whole manual labor thing?

Miss America was too good for it.

Her girlfriend thought otherwise. She did this fun thing which was whining ‘ _babe_ ’ until America Chavez laughed, plucked Kate’s glasses right off her face and put them on her own head, and got out of the driver’s seat in jeans and huge ass-kicking boots to go pick up some puppies.

She was stunning.

She remembered Spidey and gave him a big hug.

When he introduced her to Angel and Louis, Angel could have died.

She was everything she’d ever imagined and more. She gave Angel a hug and she smelled like orange blossoms and her earing got stuck in Angel’s hair and you know what? It could fuckin’ live there now, that was cool.

Louis untangled it and put his hands up defensively when Angel made him swear later to never do that shit again while she was having a moment.

Barton opened the back of the truck to reveal a very excited Lucky who was only more excited when America lifted Hazel up neatly and set her back there among a collection of dog beds to join him. Tuesday was less excited.

She hid with Sam. And when Sam’s promises of never betraying her fell short, she went and pressed into Red’s knees with sad, sad eyes.

He couldn’t see them, but he seemed to get that she was dreading this.

“You’re okay, baby girl,” Big Red said. “You like Lucky remember? This is a bonding experience.”

“Maybe daddy needs to help her up,” America said sweetly.

Red lifted his head her way and hauled the dog up to neatly drop her into Mr. Nelson’s arms.

Wade, Spidey, Kate, and Barton lost their shit.

Mr. Nelson was not fucking amused.

“Nice try,” he said, struggling to give Tuesday back to Red.

Red shrugged, beaming and proud of his joke. He gathered Tuesday back up and handed her lovingly to America who took her with equal tenderness and settled her in the back of the truck on one of the dog beds.

Sam wanted to ride with the dogs because that was kind of his thing, apparently. He and Tuesday were eternally bonded.

Red said no.

Sam argued that he was the shortest man in the group and so it was only logical that he ride with the ladies and Barton. He could fit.

Angel could make the same argument, with the exception of Ellie. Ellie was truly the shortest human member of the current party. But Ellie had already claimed her booster seat and it was next to Spidey, who she had big plans for, which involved coloring and playing superheroes.

Red said no to both Sam and Angel.

They had rented this ridiculous SUV, he argued, waving in the general direction of said car, and had paid for all those seats, so by god, they were using them. Onward, march, children.

Mr. Nelson pointed out that they did have one seat too few in the SUV.

A silence settled over the crowd.

Sam turned to Red with much hope.

“Peter,” Red said. “Go represent this team with your youthful joints.”

Ellie was devastated. Spidey shrugged. He was game because sitting in the Hawkeye vehicle, however uncomfortable it was, meant that he could kick and shove Kate Bishop’s seat for the next two and a half hours to make her life as miserable as possible. He and Barton could even team up to do it.

It was a major bummer for everyone else. But it did mean that Angel got to sit with Ellie now, and Ellie was nothing if not walking free entertainment.

Wade was driving because he was one of two people in the car who knew how to and who, by law, could. Red claimed he could drive just fine. He’d done it multiple times in multiple emergency situations.

Mr. Nelson reminded him that he was banned from operating any vehicle while they were in each other’s company.

Red sulked about it. Mr. Nelson was deemed the second driver when Wade got tired.

Sam consoled himself with this defeat and elected to sit in the back with Louis so he could gloat over Red’s shoulder about it.

Angel parked herself next to Ellie’s car booster seat and was immediately besieged with action figures of all of the X-men and Captain America. There was not a single other Avenger in sight.

“This is Wolverine,” Ellie explained to Angel seriously as Wade shut the driver’s door and started the engine. He returned America Chavez’s thumbs up.

“He’s friends with Cap, except when they’re fighting, which is always,” Ellie continued.

Right.

Did Rogers-Cap even know Wolverine?

“He and Wolvie tolerate each other most days,” Wade informed Angel over his shoulder.

Huh. Good to know.

“This is Cyclops,” Ellie introduced next, holding up the appropriate toy. “He looks exactly like Uncle Matt, except he doesn’t have ears.”

“They’re _horns_ ,” Red lamented.

Ellie looked at him blankly.

“Ears,” she told Angel. “Uncle Matt’s Batman—did you know? It’s a secret, though. He’s gotta make more dough to really come into it.”

Red kind of melted in the seat on the other side of Ellie while Wade cackled and pulled the car around the first corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a side note: Sam and Peter didn't fuck. They're both just clingy sleepers.


	3. you go up you gotta get down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hazel had a puppy jacket.  
> Angel was going to fucking die.

Angel had learned much about what it was like to be Wade Wilson’s biological child in the last hour and a half.

Firstly, she now knew that Ellie had no fear.

None. Zip. Zilch.

She wasn’t afraid of dogs, heights, death, or even Red when he started to get a little agitated with her dumping all her toys into his lap. He told her that kids with bad manners grew spikes down their backs like stegosauruses.

Sam popped up to ask him if that’s what his dad had told him, to which he’d replied “no, my gran used to tell me that my old man was possessed by a demon, though, does that count?,” and this somehow triggered something in Ellie’s brain that revealed fact number two about her, which was that she was convinced that she was, somehow, also Deadpool like her dad.

“I got a cut once and it healed all the way away in two days,” she told Angel, showing her the once-injured finger. “I’m invinced-able.”

“When I get cuts, I heal in a couple days, too,” Angel told her.

She received silence and huge, owlish eyes in response.

“Daddy,” Ellie announced, “You never said I had a sister.”

“That’s ‘cause you don’t, pumpkin,” Wade said testily, leaning out of the driver’s side window to stare down the rogue cow slowly munching muddy weeds in front of them on the road without a damn care in the world.

“I think not,” he told it.

“Husband, there is bovine,” Mr. Nelson reported over his shoulder. “It’s your time to shine.”

Red threw open the side door before anyone could grab him.

Turned out that Red had a thing with cows. Not _for_ them. _With_ them.

They loved him. And he seemed to love them right back.

The giant, shaggy beast in the middle of the road lifted its head upon Red taking two steps out towards it and realizing abruptly that the ground upon which he was standing was neither well-paved nor stable. Mr. Nelson beat Sam in also realizing this and rushing out of the car door; he managed to catch Red’s elbow before the compacted ice he was standing on sent them all the way back through the mountains to the ER.

Once steadied and provided with a stick, Red tap-tap-tapped his way over to the cow and held out a hand.

The cow didn’t move. Until it did.

And boy, did it.

“Alright, Cindrella, good job, that’s enough,” Wade called as his kid cheered at the window over Angel’s lap, “Get back in before your l’il tootsies get cold.”

Red elected to ignore this. He and this cow were soulmates. He was out there, petting and murmuring to this cow on the side of the road now while his husband put his back into trying to drag him away from it.

The cow kept angling itself so that it was closer and closer to Red, therefore closer and closer to Mr. Nelson.

Mr. Nelson did not appreciate the cow.

Wade sighed as though this was not the first, nor the last time he’d endured Red making friends with such creatures.

“We’re gonna lose him to fuckin’ Big Foot one of these days,” he grumbled as Sam scrambled over Red’s abandoned seat to go get ahold of the guy’s other arm.

“BIG FOOT,” Ellie roared.

Angel and Louis instinctually took cover at the sound, but Wade didn’t so much as wince.

Red was soon replaced into the car with only slight difficulty. This difficulty looked like Sam eating shit on black ice. It then looked like Mr. Nelson panicking and trying to help him, only to slip himself on black ice, which subsequently left the most visually impaired member of their trio as the last man standing.

Needless to say, Red took exactly one step towards his family and was just barely saved from himself by Wade who’d finally had enough of their ‘disgusting city antics’ and had stomped out to put an end to what he seemed to consider a show of nothing less than a lack of basic situational awareness.

While he hauled everyone up and then back into the SUV, Ellie wriggled around in her booster seat to tell Louis very knowledgeably that her daddy had a super-secret shape-shifting ability and when he got mad. She swore that he turned into one of the evil snowmen from _Frozen_ —the ones that guarded Elsa’s ice castle.

Louis said that that was very cool.

Louis did not say, ‘actually, honey, when your dad gets mad, he razes, salts, and burns warehouses while cackling maniacally like that one scene in _Lilo and Stitch_ where Stitch blows up a semi.’

He thought it though. Angel could see it in his eyes.

They hit a tiny town that was done up exactly as Angel expected a tiny town located in the mountains to look like and stopped for gas, which was great because just as they were getting off the freeway, Red’s phone announced that it had a text from ‘Barton.’

The text read out “Come get your asshole please. I can’t take this anymore.” To which Red replied “You’re Hawkeye. Making it work is your thing.”

Barton thought not.

They pulled up by the gas pump and were unleashed (in Ellie’s case) to go fall on nasty hard snow in the field next to it while Mr. Nelson taught Sam how to pump gas. The Hawkeye mobile pulled up behind them shortly after and almost instantly, Barton was chasing everyone out of it and un-folding himself from the backseat.

Angel was impressed to see that neither Kate nor Spidey questioned his authority as he did this. They just got the fuck out of the way.

“YOU,” Barton snapped, throwing open the tailgate.

There was a bark.

“What’s he done to you?” Barton barked right back at it. 

Mr. Nelson looked up for exactly one half-second before deciding that this was not his problem.

Red sighed and tapped his way over towards the truck.

“Hazel,” he said exhaustedly.

And the barking went off the fucking charts and Hazel came hurtling out of the back of the truck to lick Red’s face and try to crawl into his arms. Red allowed this. He held her like she was a toddler and she just wagged her tail with her paws on his shoulders.

“You’re the bane of my existence,” he told her.

“She’s fine,” America said from the other side of the truck. “Someone’s just hypersensitive about Lucky’s comfort.”

“She keeps _licking_ his _mouth_ ,” Barton told Red. “There has been no consent, Red. Consent. This is sexual battery.”

Hazel tried to lick _his_ mouth from her new vantage point.

Red sighed and set her down and she did a couple of cute little loops around him before freezing and pricking her ears towards the lot Ellie was getting her wiggles out in.

Red snagged her collar before she bolted.

“Only one thing for it,” he said.

Hazel had a puppy jacket.

Angel was going to fucking die.

It was magenta and looked like a kid’s puffy snow vest and Hazel became a whole different dog when she was stuffed into it.

“She likes clothes,” Red told Angel and Louis while Barton made offended sounds and gestures at the patient, happy dog before him.

“Is it ‘cause she wears a harness all the time?” Angel asked.

Red considered it. Spidey snuck around him in order to tell Hazel just how pretty he thought her new outfit was.

“Probably,” Red decided. “But if Tues is wearing clothes and she’s just got the harness, she’ll take Tuesday’s right off her.”

“It’s okay, baby girl,” Spidey gushed. “I like clothes, too.”

They took another couple of minutes to let the child and dogs run themselves into collective better behavior.

Red told Sam to go join them.

Sam told him to make him.

Spidey came over while Angel and Louis were watching that battle of wills and asked them if they were doing okay or if they wanted to switch cars.

“I know the old guys can be a lot sometimes,” he said.

“What’re your tunes?” Angel asked him.

“Well, they _were_ Kate’s collection of emotionally damaged sopranos, but I think we’re moving onto Clint’s music which, I am told, is the eighth wonder of the natural world,” Spidey said.

“In a good way?” Louis asked.

“That is yet to be seen,” Spidey said solemnly.

Angel weighed her options.

She _could_ swap with Spidey and spend the next hour or so basking in the presence of America Chavez. Or she could continue to watch Ellie tell Red dinosaur facts that could not be farther from the truth while one of the veins in his neck twitched with the unyielding urge to be a know-it-all.

“Is there dog-monitoring required?” she asked.

“Minimal,” Spidey told her. “Barton’s kind of a control-freak, believe it or not.”

Nice.

“I’m leaving you, Louis,” Angel said regretfully.

“I’ll miss you,” Louis mourned.

**S3:** Girl switch back.

 **S2:** why?

 **S3:** Spidey knows the entire Paw Patrol jingle. He and Ellie have been singing it for 15 minutes. Red is going to murder them both and hide their bodies in the snow. 

**S2:** yeah see I could do that

 **S2:** But Hawkguy just told a wild story about this time he and Kate accidently got the Hulk high, so???

 **S4:** HNG

 **S3:** oh hey miles. How are you doing?

 **S4:** I want to CAMP

 **S2:** lol we’re not camping. It’s too cold for that shit. We’re staying in a cabin

 **S3:** y’all. Sam is now explaining the concept of Paw Patrol to Red. I think his brain just broke. Mr. Nelson keeps reminding him that it’s not real.

 **S2:** FUCK. Switch cars with me.

 **S3:** no I don’t want to anymore.

 **S3:** Oh my god, Red’s telling a story about a talking raccoon he met in a bar once.

 **S2:** Hawkeye says he knows that raccoon.

 **S4:** this isn’t fair. I want to bond too.

 **D2:** aw, you guys sound like you’re having fun.

 **S3:** aldjfas;ldkfjasdkfj Wade just said he’s done coke with this raccoon

 **S4:** how do you do coke with a racoon?? Can racoons snort??

 **S3:** Spidey says that this one does. Apparently its been trying to steal the winter soldier’s arm for going on 10 years?

 **S4:** HOW OLD IS THIS RACCOON?

 **S2:** No. Shut up. Hawkeye just said that this racoon has a tree friend who only Thor can understand because Thor took Tree as a language elective in Asgardian high school.

 **S4:** lol that sounds exactly like Thor.

 **S4:** wait

 **S4:** I have Cap’s number now. I can ask him to ask Thor what the other electives were

 **S2:** what

 **S4:** Hey you think he could get smth from the Star Wars droid beeps?

 **S3:** nope, go back kiddo. when’d you get Cap’s number?

 **S4:** when my teammates forsook me for no-Miles fun.

 **S4:** (we’re neighbors and he likes me and he and Spidey are fighting over me. It’s nbd)

 **D2:** what is ‘nbd?’

 **S2:** WHAT

 **S3:** Spidey says that he’s not fighting over you, Miles. He says you have agency and the intelligence to know that he is eons better than Cap any day of the week.

 **S4:** yeah, see. That’s true. But I had a cold and Cap made me something called a hot toddy with alcohol in it soooooo

 **S3:** red wants you to know that that’s illegal and you and cap are going to jail

 **D2:** hi, what’s ‘nbd??’

 **SM:** WE ARE TEXTING????

 **S3:** no

 **S2:** ugh spidey go away not everything is about you

 **D2:** how is wade’s daughter? Is she nice?

 **S2:** she’s incredible

 **S3:** she’s showing me how to swallow m&ms without chewing.

 **SM:** she is not

 **S3:** blink and you’ll miss it

 **SM:** louis wade will read this and I am in charge rn don’t blow this for me

 **S3:** Red is in charge rn. He’s taken the m&ms.

 **S2:** No America Chavez is in charge. We are no longer listening to Cats the Musical and every hawkeye in this car is upset about it. Get on our level, SUV dudes.

The curving roads gave way to a lake. It was decided that they would all stop at this lake and have a little hike.

They parked the car and the commotion of getting hike-ready began.

Angel found herself watching Barton make a very intense choice about whether or not he wanted to wear a long-sleeved jacket. He held the jacket up in one hand and stared directly at his bicep for a long time while America Chavez asked Kate if she thought she needed to swap boots.

“Depends, babe, you want to slide dramatically into my arms?” Kate asked sweetly.

“You’d drop me,” America said.

“I’d hold you tenderly on the ground,” Kate beamed.

America decided that she’d swap shoes. She popped open her door and went around to open the tailgate to collect her shoes from their canine guardians. Angel went with her to grab her own boots. They were cold as hell and the dogs were excited to be released from their vehicular prison. Hazel leapt out of the truck bed as soon as she caught sight of Red hauling Ellie out of the SUV.

She sailed through the air so majestically that Angel’s only thought was of Air Bud as she hit the ground running and nearly bowled Red over.

America lifted an eyebrow that way and looked back in towards the elderly and disabled dogs remaining.

“Anyone else wanna give it a go?” she asked them.

Angel felt a little like the whole world was falling into place when she saw two harnesses come out for the puppies.

Two.

Not one.

“Honey, I’m gonna need you to stay still,” Red told Hazel who was wagging her whole butt too hard for him to get her vest over her head. She settled down immediately and let him get the harness over her head like she was a real guide dog without boiling emotions.

“That’s better. Alright. Samuel—”

“TUESDAY, MY DARLING.”

Spidey even looked surprised at the outburst and sudden abandonment.

Sam climbed into the back of the truck in a flash and flung himself upon Tuesday like they hadn’t seen each other in years. Angel couldn’t see her, but she got the feeling that Tuesday was charmed.

Barton watched in awe and, well maybe not amazement. More like shock.

“You sure this is your kid, Red?” he asked.

Red didn’t answer.

Two dogs with two harnesses happened because Sam was learning how to use a guide dog.

He wasn’t great at it.

He was emphatically bad at it.

It made Red very tired, very quickly, but Angel thought it was kind of nice that he was trying. Spidey thought so too and kept making soft encouraging remarks to Red which suggested to Angel that he’d had a hard time with Tuesday when he’d first gotten her, too.

Wade offered Sam Ellie as a replacement. Naturally, Ellie wanted to wear the harness.

“I’m a dog,” she told Wade as he re-tied the laces of the tiny hiking boots with hot pink soles on her feet.

“You’re a monster,” Wade told her.

“ _You’re_ a monster.”

“No, I’m a dog.”

Ellie was delighted by this. Wade set her down and she was off like a shot for the snow. Louis freaked out and gave chase after her, but Wade just waved a dismissive hand.

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s bouncy.”

They had kind of a big group which made hiking a little more difficult than it would be otherwise—so Spidey said anyways. Angel had hiked maybe three times in her life.

She schlepped a lot, though. Schlepped to work, schlepped to school, schlepped home. She was a professional schlepper.

This made Spidey’s face do wrinkly things.

He said that what they were doing would be a mix between a schlep and a climb and there was compacted ice everywhere, so it was important that everyone be careful. Except Wade. Wade was allowed to do whatever he wanted.

“Red and me are going bouldering,” Wade declared.

This was news to Red. But he was game.

Mr. Nelson quashed that thought in a heartbeat. Then he quashed Sam’s hopes and dreams before they even saw sunlight.

Angel ended up holding Ellie’s hand as the more limber and experienced of the troop went slipping and stumbling up ahead of them. Spidey and Kate up there appeared to be caught in a race of some kind. It looked like it involved a lot of shoving.

“I’m a snow plough,” Ellie told her feet, dragging them through the gravel and ignoring Lucky as he circled back from wherever Barton was to check on them at the back again.

“Snow ploughs are tall,” Angel noted.

“I’m tall.”

Uh-huh. And Angel was a bagel.

She looked over at the side of the trail where there were little pillow-y piles of snow and then back at the kid. Wade said not to let Ellie go wearing herself out until they got to the picnic area about another mile in. He said he anticipated carrying her some of the back, but it would be good for her to go the whole way there by herself.

Wade was scarily parent-y when he said those things.

They were probably just a request, but Angel’s brain translated them to a threat anyways.

Lucky for them, although they were in the rear, they weren’t the very last of the group.

Red and Hazel were all the way in back. Red carefully tapped his way along the uneven path while Hazel pulled him around big slippery patches of ice.

Sam was not with him.

Sam was in the middle of the group and had almost slipped off of two cliff-faces already even though they’d only been walking for twenty minutes. Tuesday was terrified for him. Red told Angel when she took Ellie back with her to help him step down through an especially tricky collection of big rocks that Tuesday was trying to work with Sam but he wasn’t great at listening to what she was telling him yet.

This gave Tuesday much anxiety. She clearly did not want to be dragged off into the expanse of glittering white that lined the hill and gullies on right side of the path.

Sam had other ideas.

Sam seemed to love the snow, but from the way Tuesday kept pulling him back to the center of the trail, Angel got the feeling that he had a bit of a hard time telling where the stuff on the side of the trail ended and the stuff on the cliff-face began.

It didn’t slow him down much. He was doing well keeping pace with Spidey, Kate, and America. Tuesday, however, was soon exasperated and handed off to Mr. Nelson while Spidey and Sam went to attempt to climb one of the towering pine trees sticking out of the heavy snow and spreading its needles into fern-shaped fans way up into the sky.

Climbing a pine tree was obviously no challenge for Spidey with his sticky hands and absurd reflexes. Sam had to be more creative though, which lead to him using the tree next to the target tree. He gained height by jumping between them in a zig-zag pattern.

Angel had only ever seen people do that in parkour videos. It was mesmerizing.

“I wanna do that,” Ellie told her, pointing after Sam.

“Same,” Angel said, still a little mystified.

“It’s not hard,” Kate’s voice suddenly said over her shoulder.

Angel looked back to see her standing there, somehow covered in snow even though they hadn’t passed too many substantial patches yet.

Maybe she’d rolled around in one? Or maybe Spidey had shoved her off the trail a ways back and she’d just caught back up?

“Looks hard,” Angel said. “And dangerous.”

“Coupla splinters, no big deal,” Kate said. “You wanna learn?”

No.

Absolutely not.

“Louis does,” Angel told her.

Kate lit up.

**S3:** just for the record, angel: I hate you.

 **S2:** 😘

Spidey found a family of squirrels up in his new perch and was so taken with them and invested in their protection that he decided that an end to the tree-climbing business was to be implemented immediately. That was fine and probably better for the environment generally, but the timing of his heartache could have come a little sooner.

You know, maybe before they’d gotten into the dense part of the forest.

“He’s stuck,” Ellie told Angel knowledgably, looking back and pointing up at a very confused Sam.

“Yeah, he is,” Angel said.

“We need an axe,” Ellie said sagely. “Or a beaver.”

Uuuuuuh.

Sure.

How about a hero?

They had them in droves on this hike.

“No, no. Leave him there,” Red said. “He’s got to learn.”

“Kinda harsh, man,” Hawkeye said.

“You did the same thing,” Kate huffed as she came circling back from torturing Louis. “America says she can grab him.”

“I don’t need an alien, thanks,” Sam called down. “Don’t worry, I got this. Go on, I’ll catch up.”

Red hummed. Hawkeye side-eyed him.

“Pete can grab him if he’s weirded out by the other-dimension thing,” he said.

“He’ll figure it out,” Red said. “Just go on ahead.”

It took Sam ten minutes. A very surprising ten minutes, which saw the rest of them finally finding the picnic area by the lake’s shore and taking the dogs off their leads and out of their harnesses to go wreak havoc on the snow.

Wade came back to the back of the group and caught Ellie under the arms. He swung her right into the deepest part of it, and she screamed.

Angel’s gut froze and a thousand memories of Alma screaming flashed through her brain before her ears caught up with her brain and translated it into a positive scream, and she finally heard the intermittent shrieks and yips that followed it.

Ellie flung handfuls of snow up into the air while Wade watched on, nodding in approval.

Red didn’t acknowledge Sam in any particular way when he caught up again, but Sam, Angel thought, seemed a little spooked.

He came over to Red of all people and tucked an arm through his for a couple of minutes. Angel wasn’t sure if they were talking, but she found that she was kind of mad at Red for making everyone leave Sam while he was stuck. It was pretty fucked up to leave a disabled guy stuck in a tree, even if it was kind of his fault that he’d gotten stuck to begin with.

If she’d had an apprentice, it wouldn’t have been how she’d have taught them not to climb trees.

A nudge at her side brought her eyes up to Louis and Spidey.

“It’s not our business,” Louis said softly, evidently reading her like a book.

“Matt’s not trying to be mean,” Spidey said, always apologetic for both Red and Wade when they did fucked up stuff. She wondered if he even knew that he was constantly saying sorry for them.

“Doesn’t matter if he’s not trying to be,” Angel pointed out.

“Sam was safe, any of us would have gone back and helped him if he’d needed it,” Spidey said. “But we all learn in different ways and when you’ve got a newbie along with you, you’ve kind of just got to trust that their mentor knows what’s best for them.”

Sam wasn’t a newbie.

Sam had been out being Blindspot for as long as, if not longer than, Angel and Dave had been out being stupid in the streets.

Spidey struggled with what to say when she pointed that out.

It was weird. Louis watched him think really hard for a bit before taking over for him in a Louis-typical way.

“We’re not Spidey’s mentees,” he told her. “He’s not our boss or teacher or anything like that. He’s our teammate. It’s different. Right?”

Spidey chewed a lip and lifted a shoulder while he nodded.

“Folks think Miles is my mentee,” he revealed. “Because I actively teach him. You guys learned so much already on your own and you started out working on your own, so it’s—it’s really different.”

Okay, fine.

“But you didn’t?” she asked.

Spidey shrugged completely this time and rolled his head like he didn’t want to talk about it.

He almost never wanted to talk about being a young Spiderman. Angel figured it must have sucked. Must have been really scary being the only one for so long and not having any real role models or people to ask for advice.

“People used to say Mr. Stark was my mentor,” Spidey said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But that was something different from what people thought it was. He never sat me down and taught me how to fight or anything like that. Matt and Wade did that, but even then, that was only after I’d been at it for a while. They just came in to, I dunno, refine things so I didn’t die before my 18th birthday.”

Ah. Okay, that made sense.

So Bitsy was the mentee in their group.

“Would you leave Bitsy in a tree, though?” she asked.

Spidey paused and cocked his head, thinking about it.

“Yeah, probably,” he admitted.

And like, yeah. If it was Bitsy they were talking about, Angel would, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want all the mentors and mentees to compete in a battle royale pls.  
> I don't know who I want to win, but I want to see TEAMWORK


	4. get yourself to sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Nelson looked up at Barton who beamed at him.  
> “I’ve got half a mind to make you two sleep together,” he said.  
> “I wouldn’t, man. I’m kind of a homewrecker,” Barton said.

There was a lake by the snow-covered picnic tables.

Mr. Nelson saw it, then started saying very loudly that it was too bad that they’d ended up in a valley between two hills.

He said that it must have been a park area during the summer. It would be a great place to have a picnic with the family.

Angel stared at the lake that broke out on the left side of the tables into an enormous, flat swath of blue and green and reflected mountains, and then looked back to him. Then back to the water, where Wade had begun following Ellie casually as she scrabbled her way through all the fallen snow and rotting wood guarding the shore to go stick her hands in it.

Mr. Nelson watched this happening. He _watched_ it and then sighed.

“Too bad, guys,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find water a little farther down.”

Angel turned behind her to Red and Sam who were tucked together facing Mr. Nelson with vacant expressions.

Spidey started to get uncomfortable, too.

“Uh, Fogs?” he said. “There’s—”

“A _park_ ,” Mr. Nelson said, not in his direction at all.

Spidey sought out Wade’s back and made soft, slightly desperate sounds his way, but Wade was busy standing on a rock, towering over Ellie and holding the back of her puffy blue jacket as she flailed, trying to face-plant into the water. He didn’t turn around.

“I’m not that blind,” Sam volunteered for the group’s edification.

“And I’m not stupid,” Mr. Nelson pointed out.

The awkward standoff continued.

“Just one touch,” Sam said.

“There’s nothing to touch,” Mr. Nelson said.

“Like. A pinky,” Sam negotiated.

Red nodded sagely as though this request was very reasonable.

“You can stick as many hands in as much snow as you like,” Mr. Nelson said. “Especially seeing as that’s all that there is out here.”

Sam pressed in closer to Red. Red appeared to be deep in thought. He seemed like he’d left all of them for a moment or so to commune with Neptune.

“One touch,” he finally said.

“Matt, no,” Mr. Nelson countered.

“We’ll do one touch,” Red said, nodding and pulling Sam with him towards the deathtrap of shrubs lining the edge of the lake.

Spidey finally seemed to understand what was happening as Mr. Nelson dragged a palm down his face and started muttering furiously.

“Guys, one of you will fall in,” Spidey called after the other two.

He got no response.

“Guys?”

Angel wondered what it was like to be blind and stick your hands in a lake. Like, how did you know it was safe? How did you know how to avoid all the trash and scum and shit that lived on the surface of every lake ever?

Red told Sam to be careful. Sam told Red to be careful. Wade finally noticed that he and Ellie had company as their two-man team did a cool synchronized bend over towards the surface of the water. Spidey moved from trying to bring Mr. Nelson’s blood pressure back down to baseline to attempting (poorly) to casually meander over their way. America looked back from where she and the Hawkeyes had gone up ahead and did a funny little twitch before following suit.

“5 on Red,” Louis whispered into Angel’s ear.

Oho.

No, no.

Their best buddy Samuel over there had just gotten stuck in a tree, dear friend.

There was no way he wasn’t about to have a Very Bad Day.

“5 on Sam,” she whispered back.

“Deal.”

What happened next was just textbook.

“BOO.”

Jump.

Scramble.

Slide.

Shriek.

“WADE, YOU FUCKHEAD.”

“Excuse me? I just saved your life. Be grateful.”

“You nearly murdered my _dog_.”

It was always rewarding to watch Red and Wade go at it. You never knew where the two of them would end up.

“Ehn. She’s fine.”

“She’s got _anxiety_.”

“And now she’s learned an important life lesson,” Wade pointed out reasonably while Ellie petted Hazel’s very sad face. Hazel twisted away from her and tried to lick at her wet fur through Red’s protective arms.

“She’s going to get hypothermia,” Red snapped.

Wade shrugged.

“Better her than you,” he said.

Red started to stand up. Sam and Mr. Nelson flung themselves onto each of his shoulders to keep him in place, babbling on suddenly about the hand-towels that they all kept in their traveling dog-bags. Spidey wormed himself in between Red and Wade with wide, placating palms held up.

“Yo. Did Hazel pull a Lucky just now?” Kate’s voice interrupted.

Angel looked over and saw that the Hawkeyes had migrated after America at speed. Barton seemed intrigued.

“I thought you said they were “impeccably” trained, big guy,” he directed at Red.

He got growled at.

“They are,” Red said.

A wet-sounding crash drew everyone’s attention back out to the water. Lucky had decided that there could not be only wet dog in the party. He wriggled his way out a ways and deftly latched onto a bit of driftwood before slowly making a U-turn and heading back.

Barton sniffed.

“Well, two’s company,” he said.

Kate winced, then turned back towards Red and Wade with an apologetic expression.

“Don’t worry. We’re ready for this,” she said.

Lucky, Barton explained with the wave of his hand, was born to be a water dog, and the only thing holding him back from reaching his full potential was ableism and the fact that Barton’s bathtub wasn’t big enough to swim in.

Kate asked Barton if he was projecting and he took out his hearing aids and carried on the conversation like she wasn’t even there.

Lucky, he carried on saying in a slightly too loud tone, was allowed to do whatever the fuck he wanted to be because he’d saved Barton’s life twice now. So if Lucky wanted to be a water dog, then it was Clint’s moral responsibility to find a way to help him achieve his life’s goals.

This was his complicated reasoning for the two full-sized bathsheets he had rolled and packed with military precision into his backpack. He bestowed the gray one upon Hazel for her life-saving services.

Hazel cowered between Red’s knees while he and Mr. Nelson dried her off.

They set off again when the dog was moderately dry, sweatered and harnessed so that Red could make soft pitying noises at her at his leisure.

This time, America took the lead and showed off her talents as a camp counselor by pointing at various plants and giving them names.

Angel made the sign of the cross and touched every tree that she had touched when they passed it. Louis thought that this was hilarious.

Louis needed to learn how to humble himself in front of their resident goddess.

“She just called a pine an oak, girl. She’s making shit up,” he said.

“No,” Angel told him firmly, “If America thinks a pine is an oak, then what we need is a new definition of pine.”

Louis snorted.

Angel prepared herself to literally beat some sense into him just as Sam raised his hand from next to Barton and called ahead, “So that’s not a pine or an oak, technically, it’s a fir.”

The gals up front stopped and stared at him.

Sam stared back.

“The one before that was an aspen,” he said.

Kate’s eyebrow lifted.

“Aspens have flat leaves with teeth around the edges,” Sam reported. “They can grow up to twenty-five meters tall and elk are known to eat their bark.”

Barton considered him, then looked over to Spidey as if he could confirm this information. Spidey just made a ‘huh’ face.

“Firs are in the same family as pines, but they’re a different genus,” Sam said.

“This is gonna be the fig thing again. I can feel this being the fig thing again,” Louis mumbled.

“What fig thing?” Barton asked.

Sam jerked his face his way and gazed up into his soul through his eyes.

Oh hell no.

Barton was unfazed by the fig thing.

Kate was horrified.

Barton asked Spidey if he remembered the time Ironman gave him and the Black Widow boxes of moths at the Avengers Christmas party a few years back.

He’d explained that they were specially sourced snacks for the arachnids of the group because Catering claimed that they had to draw the line somewhere. It had been a joke.

The Widow had eaten one right in front of his face.

Spidey laughed at the memory.

Kate told everyone to shut the fuck up or else she was gonna cry.

Ellie decided that this was the perfect time to announce that she’d bitten a tarantula on a field trip to the zoo last year and Wade stopped walking and picked her up. He held her at eye level and said, with a frighteningly serious tone, “you are too powerful.”

She told him it tasted hairy.

“Do not tell your foster mom,” he said.

“The zoo says I’m not allowed to come back ‘til I’m eight,” Ellie told him.

“I think eight might still be too soon,” Wade said.

They hiked up a big hill and had lunch at the top and by then, everyone was huffing and puffing and cold enough that it was determined that it was time to move on. The dogs were put back into the car. They went with much enthusiasm this time and got only move excited and happy when Kate reached back and scooted their beds closer together so that they could cuddle.

Ellie declared that she wanted to ride with the puppies this time.

Wade told her that spider-eaters had to stay in their booster seats.

She told him that Uncle Peter was a cannibal and so he had to stay right where he was too.

Wade didn’t argue this logic, which left Spidey trying to explain to Ellie that he wasn’t a spider like that. He didn’t eat other spiders. He was nice to other spiders. He took them outside instead of killing them and through this, hoped to garner enough favor for them to treat him kindly if he ever died in their presence.

Ellie blankfaced him and decided instead that it was Uncle Red’s turn to ride with the Hawkeyes.

Kate said that he couldn’t because she didn’t need him and Barton plotting against her in their ancient, wily ways.

Sam volunteered, and to keep him from listing out any more spider facts, it was agreed that he was allowed to go. But he had to ride in the carriage. Not with the dogs.

He was mad about that.

**S2:** Spidey

 **S2:** Spidey

 **S2:** Spidey

 **SM:** I’m right next to you.

 **S4:** OH.

 **S4:** So it’s the Fun Crew is it??

 **S3:** lol Miles you’re still so mad

 **S2:** Spidey stop texting other people. Its bonding time.

 **SM:** I’m having bonding time with my other friends.

 **S2:** you don’t have friends stop lying.

 **S4:** you know who has friends?? Me. I’ve got friends. Friends who don’t abandon me to go camping.

 **S3:** Miles, we didn’t abandon you. Your mom said no. That’s not our fault.

 **S4:** I’m not talking to you louis you’re my friend. I’m talking about the jerks.

 **SM:** Angel I’ve got plenty of friends. You’re sitting amongst my friends.

 **S2:** yeah this is everyone. Who are you texting

 **SM:** none of your business.

 **S4:** Just so we’re all aware. I’m chilling with Thor and he’s teaching me Tree.

 **S4:** so whatever you’re doing it isn’t as cool as what I am.

 **D2:** hi, Quick question: does anyone know an oral surgeon?

 **BT:** We’re texting!!! Thank god. America has instituted the Silence Game over here and I think I’m dying

 **SM:** Dr. Liz Solomon in Flushing. She takes most insurance. Tell her May from yoga’s Peter sent you.

 **D2:** ok thank u so much

 **S2:** um? Dave?

 **S3:** are you okay??

 **D2:** Charlie took a foot to the face in little league. She’s handling it like a champ, but I’m glad we held off on the braces until 8th grade.

 **SM:** yiiiiiiiiikes

 **SM:** send her our support?

 **BT:** tell her she’s 3x as hardcore as the other kids and the new teeth will give her mind control powers

 **S2:** why in gods name would you do that?

 **BT:** some of us have baby siblings and a hereditary weird gene in our families.

 **S2:** my family’s weird gene looks waaaaay different from yours.

 **BT:** its okay it happens.

 **SM:** my uncle used to collect blueprints of toaster models for me when I was a kid.

 **BT:** that’s adorable

 **S3:** uh? Why?

 **SM:** because ours broke and he had a whole lot of faith in 10yo me.

 **BT:** THAT’S SO CUTE

 **S2:** okay listen this nerdfest needs to stop. I’m not doing this again. Spidey needs to answer what I was asking him before the rest of yall posers nosed in here. Who are you texting????

 **SM:** I like the nerdfest better. Sam tell us a cute baby inventor story

 **S4:** I am ready for this.

 **S3:** I am too

 **BT:** oh I don’t have a lot of them. I was in acrobat school when I was little and then Hannah needed watching so I didn’t really have a lot of time for tinkering until I was in my teens. And by then I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted and needed to do.

 **S2:** oh

 **S3:** oh

 **S4:** oh

 **SM:** Gotcha. Cool! Anyways I’m texting my coworkers. Himani thinks one of my labs is haunted and she’s having a breakdown in our chat.

 **S2:** TELL US MORE.

 **SM:** I guess the door keeps closing behind her and stuff has been falling off shelves. So now she’s trying to figure out how to appease this ghost without knowing a single thing about it. She’s put all the coffee from the break room on the center table and Saanvi is saying she’s using the scientific method to figure out how much milk the ghost takes.

 **S2:** this is exactly what I want to hear. How does she know when she’s getting closer?

 **SM:** when she starts to feel an overwhelming sense of doom apparently. Saanvi says she’s been crying in my lab over oatmilk for hours now.

 **S3:** what exactly are you supposed to do to manage that from here?

 **SM:** oh that’s not the point of this conversation. We’re just trying to figure out if she might have better results with soy or full fat

 **S2:** man, I wish my coworkers would leave me in a haunted room with a malevolent coffee ghost ☹

 **S3:** same. I wish my coworkers would help me write messages in wax under all our keyboards 😞

 **S4:** I feel that. I wish my coworkers would help me summon evil spirits in an abandoned barn 😥

 **BT:** absolutely. I wish my coworkers would hold the chicken when we raise the undead.

 **DD:** what the FUCK is happening in here right now?

 **SM:** SCATTER

The place they were spending the night was a kitschy-looking cabin that claimed it could sleep nine people comfortably and up to twelve uncomfortably. It had two big bedrooms with queen-sized beds in them and one room with two sets of bunkbeds in it. There was a pull out sofa that someone could sleep on in the cramped living room.

Red said obviously he and Mr. Nelson were taking one of the bunkbeds.

Mr. Nelson surprisingly had no problem with this. But then again, he and Red had apparently shared a miniscule dorm room for years at the beginning of their acquaintance; uncomfortableness and close proximity were kind of their thing.

Angel and Louis figured that they would take the other two beds in the bunk room and that would be that when it was made clear to them that Nelson and Murdock fully intended to cram together in one of the larger lower bunks.

Why?

Because apparently, in Red’s words, “he got cold.”

“He doesn’t want to give Hawkeye the chance to prank him,” Spidey said flat out. “The last time they overnighted together, Clint buried him in packing peanuts.”

Barton laughed so hard at the memory that he got stomach cramps and had to leave the room.

Apparently, he’d woken Red up by methodically cramming said peanuts into his mouth until they squeaked.

Angel kind of didn’t blame Red for trying to avoid another surrealist nightmare like that.

“Okay, so who’s in bunk 4?” Louis asked.

Well, obviously Clint.

Dinner was fine. Dinner consisted of baked potatoes with a huge variety of toppings and watching Ellie methodically feed the dogs potato skins and bacon bits.

Getting ready for bed, however, was a treat because Red was paranoid and Barton was stacking fuel on top of those coals by being extra super nice and normal to him.

Angel giggled as she watched Barton blow Red a kiss from over the edge of the top bunk. Red scowled at him and crammed himself into the duvet that he’d gone out of his way to bring with him (he’d said something about sheets). He buried himself in it and groped for Mr. Nelson with a hand poking out of the pile until the man himself arrived and watched the grabbing hand for a few seconds.

Mr. Nelson looked up at Barton who beamed at him.

“I’ve got half a mind to make you two sleep together,” he said.

“I wouldn’t, man. I’m kind of a homewrecker,” Barton said.

Louis made a choking noise in his sleeping bag.

Getting to sleep was impossible. Not because things were weird or uncomfortable or because the tension of the powerplay between Barton and Red still hung in the air ominously, but because there was just something so exciting about being out in the mountains with all these interesting people and their interesting stories.

Angel never got to do things. Before Spiderman, her life had just been job, job, school, sleep, job, job, job.

And now here she was in the Sierra mountains.

Doing cool things. Being with cool people.

She would never have dreamed of being there two years ago.

The thoughts rattled around in her head and kept her awake.

The cabin settled around her and the swish of sleeping bag fabric sounded out occasionally when someone turned over, but every so often, a louder creak or click joined the noises and these, the 2am paranoia that came with every good bout of insomnia told Angel’s brain, were actually signs of a bear trying to break into the cabin through a window or an accidentally unlocked door.

If she hadn’t been on the top bunk over Louis, she might have tip-toed out into the living room where Sam and Spidey were conked out together on the sofa bed to check the door’s lock.

But doing that ran the risk of waking up every single one of these hair-trigged human weapons along the way.

There should have been some comfort in that thought. After all, if all the hair-triggered human weapons would attack _her_ if she moved in a way that their subconscious brains decided was threatening, then surely they’d give a bear the same treatment.

But…just on the off chance that they didn’t and the door really _was_ unlocked, Angel still felt like it was maybe worth the risk. For everyone’s safety, not just hers.

She’d just made her mind up to put a toe off the side of her bunk when she heard a weird sound. A long, grating noise that sounded like it was just outside the window between the two sets of bunks. She felt her heart stop and her eyes go wide.

The noise sounded out again. Then again.

The silence between the scratching had never roared so loud.

She was just about to clear her throat when she heard fabric moving. She looked up and saw in the dim light that Barton was awake. He blinked a little confusedly and reached around under the covers to find his phone when the sound rang out.

Even he went still.

His phone dropped off the far side of the bunk and made a similar grating sound before it slapped against something.

Someone.

Definitely Red.

The scratching returned.

Barton sat all the way up.

Mr. Nelson woke up on the bunk under him and lifted his head and Angel decided that she was now allowed to panic. When it was just her awake, it was her being weird and paranoid. But when it was her plus two much taller, fully grown men?

She was now justified.

“What the hell is that?” Mr. Nelson whispered through the horrible sound.

“Might be a drunk,” Barton said.

“At this hour? Guy’s gonna pass out and freeze in the snow,” Nelson hissed.

“Tough shit, amiright?” Barton said.

There was an unamused silence.

Then Mr. Nelson whacked Red in the shoulder and a weird noise followed, which itself was followed by a “it’s Foggy, you dumbass. Drop the chokehold.”

Red mumbled a barely coherent apology and apparently tried to go back to sleep before being slapped at again.

“We need your ears for a second,” Mr. Nelson said. “Something’s outside. Can you tell if it’s animal, mineral, or plant?”

Silence.

“What are you talking about?” Red said sleepily. “There’s nothing outside.”

Um?

“Very funny,” Barton said. “Try again.”

“ _You_ try again, asshole,” Red grumbled, flopping over to get more comfortable.

“Matty,” Mr. Nelson said. “Something was scra—”

The scratching grated down the side of the house in a long, high-pitched drawl.

Angel heard more than saw Red sit up.

“Wow,” he said.

That was enough for her.

Barton’s idea was to scare the thing off by turning on the bedroom light.

And in doing that, they certainly scared Louis, if not the outside monster.

“Wha’s happ’nin’?” he slurred.

Angel shushed him while the rest of them went still and listened.

The scraping didn’t return.

“Huge raccoon,” Barton decided.

“Definitely Big Foot,” Red said.

“We should make sure whoever it is didn’t pass out in the snow,” Mr. Nelson said, getting up.

Red got up with him, very fluffy in the hair-department, and kind of sweetly loyal in his determination that his husband wasn’t going to go investigate a bad sound on his own. Barton groaned quietly and tossed his legs over the side of the bunk.

“If it’s some HYDRA operative, I’m John-Henry-ing this whole mountain,” he said, hopping down and popping his back before following after the other guys.

“What’s happening?” Louis asked, slightly less bleary this time.

“We’re being hunted by bears,” Angel told him.

She and Louis couldn’t very well sit there in the bedroom while a load of old men went out to have a poke in the snow. It just didn’t feel right. Not when everyone on this trip but Ellie was technically a trained vigilante.

She and Louis popped their heads out of the room and crept into the living room where Spidey and Sam had become a single mass of blankets.

Red stood over them with his hands on his hips. It took Angel a moment to realize he wasn’t addressing the guys, but rather all three of the dogs who seemed confused, but happy to see him.

Three tails had started wagging and Hazel started wriggling. She made a soft sound.

“Don’t you dare,” Red told her in a low voice.

“Tio!”

Red leapt a foot into the air and, in an instant, the covers on the couch had been flung off and Spidey was in front of the dogs, battle-ready in flannel pajama pants.

Ellie had her hand on the light switch. She looked surprised at how many people were in the room.

“Woah,” she said. “Lotta monsters.”

She turned the lights back off.

After a moment, Wade turned them back on.

“No monsters,” he said. “See? Demons.”

He turned it back off again.

Mr. Nelson decided that he didn’t care about this anymore and opened the cabin’s front door. Red rolled his eyes and went along after him.

Barton hung back.

“What’s happening?” Spidey asked him.

Louis leaned over to make sure Sam was still breathing.

“Weird noises,” Barton said. “Red’s thinkin’ Big Foot.”

Spidey’s face tried to find an appropriate emotion to express.

“Dogs didn’t hear anything,” he pointed out.

Barton considered this. Then considered the door.

Red came back in moments later, shaking snow out of his still fluffy hair.

“Very impressive,” Mr. Nelson said after him, coming in and closing the door behind him.

Red mumbled something and made a beeline back for bed where he rucked up the covers and disappeared again.

“Friend?” Barton asked.

“Wind,” Mr. Nelson said. “There was a branch. Matt killed it for us, have no fear.”

He petted the dogs and told them that everyone was going back to sleep. Angel had the feeling that no one was going to be able to now, though. _She_ certainly wasn’t.

Somehow, she did.

And she woke up to the bedroom door being slammed open and Ellie shrieking “SYRUP TIME.” She left the door gaping wide open and scurried off back into the living room.

Red yanked the covers back over his head. Barton remembered that he’d dropped his phone and said a prayer for it.

Spidey was awake out in the living room, but you wouldn’t know it from his and Sam’s puppy pile. Ellie had flopped down on top of both of them and was singing the Paw Patrol song in an effort to get Spidey to wake up properly and sing it with her.

Spidey watched her emptily until Wade came out of the kitchen where he and the ladies were apparently making pancakes.

“ _T_ _ío_ is grumpy until coffee,” he told her.

Ellie lit up.

“I’ll make _T_ _ío_ a coffee,” she announced.

“Oh. No, we don’t have to do that,” Spidey said robotically.

“Let’s make Uncle Red’s coffee,” Wade negotiated.

Ellie wasn’t down. She pawed at Spidey with big sad eyes. Unfortunately for her, Spidey wasn’t human enough to feel pity at the moment.

“Matt loves creative coffee,” he told her.

“But I wanna make _yours_ ,” Ellie pleaded.

“You can make Sam’s,” Spidey said.

Sam finally made a sound to indicate that he was alive.

“Okay!” Ellie beamed. “Don’t worry,” she told the emerging blanket beast that was Sam, “Imma make it cool.”

Sam’s bleary inverted eyes blinked slowly after her. Angel could practically hear the static in his brain.

“Kay,” he warbled a good two seconds too late. He waved after her, too. Then hunkered back down with his face on Spidey’s thigh.

Angel was entertaining herself by watching Spidey keep nodding off while sitting up when Ellie came rushing back to latch onto Sam’s shoulder and shake him awake.

Mission accomplished.

Sam again proved himself living, although he had abandoned Spidey’s heat for Red’s when Mr. Nelson had finally chased the guy out of the bedroom. Red and Sam now curled up together under the silk duvet next to Spidey. Sam was unhappy to be removed from it.

“I love coffee,” he said automatically when Ellie informed him that she’d finished making his and was going to bring it to him, so stay there.

Angel snickered.

She knew exactly what was about to happen. Alma used to do the same thing to her all the time.

Ellie brought Sam something that was coffee in so far as it was a mostly brown, mostly warm liquid. It had a handful of rainbow sprinkles generously added to it alongside a single pink animal cracker floating in the center.

“Imma make one for Uncle Matt, too,” she said.

Sam squinted at her.

“Boss drinks his coffee black,” he told her.

Silence.

“Okay,” Ellie said with determination. And then she left. Sam watched and Angel smothered her giggling as she saw realization start to dawn across his face.

“She’s gonna put the grounds in it,” Spidey said at Louis’s confused expression.

Breakfast was spent protecting carbs and caffeine carrying liquids from the likes of Ellie. She was on a roll now. Red’s coffee was a sludge of grounds with a tiny bit of water in it and a helpful handful of Reese’s peanut butter pieces on top.

He did not touch it.

He kind of sneered in its direction like he wanted it exorcised.

He stole sips from Mr. Nelson’s coffee, and Ellie, proud of her creation and of Red saying that it sounded too lovely to eat, had begun sneaking her ever-present gummies into everyone’s cups and mugs while they weren’t looking.

When she ran out of victims for that crime, she plunged ahead with the can of whipped cream, which she deployed on everyone’s pancakes.

One second, you were fine and the next, the screech and gurgle of a demon sounded itself off at your elbow and lo and behold.

You now had whipped cream.

Hawkeye didn’t even seem to notice her doing it, nor the fact that there was now cream on his syrup. America thanked her kindly. And Sam, apparently Ellie’s new favorite person of the day, waited until she was done before scraping the white mass on his eggs to the other side of his plate. Wade wrestled the can away after she missed Louis’s plate and covered the top of his sleeve. He hid it in one of the kitchen cabinets, then plonked her down and told her to eat her wasteland of carbs and protein or else there’d be no playing in the snow on the way home and she’d have to hold his hand the _whole time_.

She decided that there was no fate worse than this and finally, finally settled down. And as she did, there arose the discussion of what to do on the way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they're just in the mountains for a couple days btw. It's a pretty short trip, but part of a week-long bay area itinerary for the NYC crew. 
> 
> And idk if I'm the only one who does this, but when I camp I just like don't fucking sleep. I'll sleep only when I physically cannot stay awake any longer. I have an extreme and irrational fear of bears for no good reason outside of one shitty, very unfunny uncle.
> 
> Oh, and the fig thing they're talking about is is referenced in Chapter 6 of **Sidebars** (Approach with cautiousness if you have fears of bugs


	5. now rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam offered her an E.T. finger touch.  
> Ellie was baffled.  
> “Alien handshake,” Sam explained to her.  
> Spidey then ripped off his headphones without missing a beat and seized Sam’s head in his hands.  
> “Are we talking about aliens?” he asked way too seriously and close to Sam’s face.

They reloaded the cars after breakfast, made sure the cabin was clean, and double-checked that all chargers had been removed from outlets and stuffed into bags.

Then Mr. Nelson said that he would drive the SUV the way home, since Wade had driven on the way up. This meant that Red, as the significant other of the driver, was obligated to move up a rose into the passenger’s seat where he instantly transformed into a middle-aged mom clutching at his seatbelt for no discernible reason.

Mr. Nelson told him calmly that he hadn’t even started the engine yet.

Red wanted to go ride with Barton. Red said the he desperately missed Barton.

Mr. Nelson told him that if he was going to be this way for the next three hours, then he needed to speak now or forever hold his fucking peace.

Angel leaned over the seats to ask Sam if they were like this all the time.

“Sometimes,” Sam said, slumped over Spidey’s shoulder as Spidey texted his coworkers and ignored everyone else.

“How do you live with that?” Angel whispered.

Mr. Nelson told Red to drop his hands before he started the car.

“I don’t,” Sam said. “I leave. Distance keeps you from dying of awkwardness.”

Smart.

“Nice,” Barton said, “Y’all got legroom.”

Angel hoped Red was happy with all the dogs and America Chavez in the other car. Mr. Nelson wasn’t. Mr. Nelson had a mental list of Red’s many personal faults that he aired to Barton purposefully and the rest of the car by association.

Barton nodded along sagely the whole time.

“You know,” he pointed out as the rest of them—except Wade, who had been scream-laughing into the palm of his hand over Mr. Nelson’s viciousness—sat in tooth-souring silence, “The offer still stands for me to take him off your hands.”

That shut Mr. Nelson up.

He glared.

“What’s it called when you’re stuck between two redheads in bed, eh?” Barton slogged on good-naturedly. “A red velvet cake or something? ”

Wade crumpled over onto himself so that he could stifle his wail of laughter. Spidey started digging through his bag for headphones so that he could escape the hellscape they now found themselves in.

Thankfully Mr. Nelson had more grace than most people. He set his jaw and simply said, ‘touché’ before returning his attention to the road.

Ellie wanted to listen to music like Spidey. Really, what she wanted was to wear Spidey’s headphones and imitate him bobbing his head a little bit.

Wade gave her his headphones.

These would not do.

Angel offered her own headphones.

They would not do.

Ellie stretched her arm as far over the back of the seat as she could towards Spidey, but Spidey was entranced with something happening on his phone and didn’t look up. Sam caught her at it and offered her an E.T. finger touch.

Ellie was baffled.

“Alien handshake,” Sam explained to her.

Spidey then ripped off his headphones without missing a beat and seized Sam’s head in his hands.

“Are we talking about aliens?” he asked way too seriously and close to Sam’s face.

“We are now?” Sam said.

Spidey had thoughts about aliens. No, like, _thoughts_ about aliens.

That they were real was not a matter of discussion here; everyone knew that aliens were real. What everyone did not agree on was whether or not there were any friendly ones out there in any universe.

Barton said he wasn’t discussing this. It was triggering him.

Wade said, “No. Let the boy speak.”

“I want a tribble,” Spidey told Sam borderline angrily. “If I have to suffer violent alien life for the rest of my pathetic existence, then I deserve a goddamn tribble.”

“What’s a tribble?” Angel asked him.

Wade gasped and threw his hands over Ellie’s ears.

“Take it back,” he told her.

“What’s a tribble?” she repeated his way this time.

“TAKE it BACK,” he ordered.

Spidey told him to shut up. Just shut up. This was serious.

He tapped at his phone for a moment and then assaulted Angel’s eyes with a picture of a pile of fur balls.

“Oh,” she said. “People put those on purses.”

No, the nerd crowd said in horror. How dare you. This was prime Star Trek material. How fucking _dare_ you.

“Oh,” Angel said. “I haven’t seen that. I saw one of the Star Wars, though.”

“Which one?” Spidey asked.

“I dunno. The one with the blond guy.”

Spidey vibrated.

“Which _one_?” he repeated like he was standing on the edge of a waterfall.

“I don’t like Star Wars,” Sam announced.

Spidey’s rattling died off instantly. He mechanically turned his face towards Sam.

“How could you?” he whimpered.

Spidey wasn’t talking to Sam anymore. He was staring tearfully out the window. Sam tried apologizing to him and explained that his thing wasn’t so much space as it was space-time, but Spidey wasn’t hearing it.

He’d been hurt. Sam told him that when they got home, he would be happy to watch _Alien_ with him if it made him feel better.

This was good Spidey bait. He flicked his eyes back at Sam and had to put extra effort into keeping himself from forgiving him all at once.

He put all that energy into moping instead.

“We can alternate,” Sam said. “You can pick a sci-fi flick, I’ll pick a Kung-fu one, and we’ll go through as many as we can before you leave.”

Spidey pretended that this was a completely miserable offer that he was being forced to accept.

“I guess,” he said.

“It’s either that or we can play all the old baseball movies and wait for Sensei to throw himself down the stairs to listen to Rosie O’Donnell on screen,” Sam said.

Spidey pretended that this was a disappointing option, too.

“Might be fun,” he sighed.

“I’ll watch ‘em with you,” Angel told Sam. “But only if we watch Rosie first.”

They stopped at the gas station that they’d stopped at on the way in. The snow out in the vacant lot next to it was just as hard and compacted as it had been the first time. Ellie juddered in her seat until Wade helped her out and let her go sprinting for it.

Barton hopped out and went over to the parked truck at the pump behind them to go knock on the windshield and scare Kate.

She rolled down the window to take a swing at him afterwards.

Angel followed him over there to interrogate Louis as to how his personal time with Red was going.

“Oh, it’s been fine,” Louis said easily. “I guess he’s Kate and America’s attorney, so they’ve mainly been talking shop. All the vigilante folks on this side of the country are really spread out. It’s kind of a schlep for them to get together.”

No shit?

“Yeah.”

Huh.

Boring.

“We need to take more selfies to send to Bitsy before we leave so he dies of jealously,” she said. “Come help me climb onto the roof of this place.”

Spidey told them to get down, people were staring.

Angel told him to get up there and take a picture with them, then they would get down.

Spidey huffed and puffed and did a little circle in the slush down there before throwing up his hands and taking a run at the side of the building.

Sticky fingers had nothing on ice.

Red started dying laughing over with Hawkeye and the dogs.

Spidey picked himself up out of the slush and shook himself off stiffly. He gave it another go, this time going for a less icy patch on the side of the building, then going for the edge of the roof and coming up backwards in a flip.

He took a selfie with her and Louis and they all realized belatedly that voices were cheering down in front of the gas-station.

A peek showed a carload of college kids hooting and hollering up at them, saying how cool that shit was.

Then they got down, Spidey lied and told the group that they were a free-running troop on vacation. The college kids wanted to know everything about it.

They did some pretty embarrassing parkour attempts for everyone’s collective edification.

Angel hoped that she, a fellow college kid, didn’t come across like this to other people. Louis promised her that she didn’t, but he was nice to a fault. He couldn’t be trusted. She asked Sam instead.

Sam told her that she seemed to him like a big-sister type of person.

She didn’t know what that meant.

“You know, you keep looking after Ellie,” Sam said. “And you just kind of let the old folks do what they’re gonna do. It’s like right there in a big sister, but not the biggest sister, kind of role.”

“I am a big sister,” she told him.

He shrugged.

“Point proven then,” he said.

The conversation turned towards siblings. Spidey had no siblings. Louis had a younger sister. Wade had no siblings. Red said he had a twin brother. He was shouted at from every angle while looking smug as shit about it.

He did not have a twin brother.

He had a bad idea shaped exactly like himself.

Kate had a sister. America had a foster sister, but not a biological sibling. Mr. Nelson had a sister. And Barton had a brother.

Angel was gobsmacked.

“You all only have one?” she clarified.

“So it would seem?” Kate said.

“How do you cope with only one?” Angel asked. “How do you shit talk them behind their back?”

There was a long pause.

“I just shit talk her to my mom,” Mr. Nelson said.

“We’re barely on speaking terms to begin with,” Barton said. “Which might last until Easter if we’re lucky.”

“We talk _all_ the time,” Red said.

Wade threatened him with cutting off a toe and using it as fertilizer.

They got back in the cars.

They were headed back to the city now; it would be a bit of a drive with not a whole lot of unnecessary stopping. Louis told her over text that when they got back, his friend said that they needed to go to a place called Sutro Baths.

She read this out to the car and Sam called Sutro Baths a death trap. He refused to go back. One of his friends had told him that it would be fine, it would be fun, and before he knew it, he was trying to get out of a 1920s concrete ditch filled with nothing but duckweed and slime.

Spidey decided that they were going immediately.

“You don’t understand,” he told Sam, “Miles hates us all right now and the object here is to make that worse.”

**BT:** Bitsy im sorry these people are awful to you.

 **S4:** FINALLY. Recognition. Apologies. It’s okay BT, I appreciate you. The rest of them are just mean and old.

 **S2:** I’m not old

 **S4:** Ancient. Speaking of ancient: Cap asked me to go on a mission with him. Are y’all jealous?

 **S2:** no

 **S3:** yes. What are you guys doing, Miles?

 **S4:** Okay it’s gonna sound nuts. Are you ready?

 **S4:** its chickens.

 **D2:** Why.

 **S4:** Sergeant Barnes wants chickens and made a coop for them, but Cap and Mr. Wilson don’t want em, so Cap asked me to come pick birds out with them

 **S2:** wait. I’m confused. If they don’t want birds why are they getting birds?

 **S4:** Because Cap says he’s got a point to prove.

 **SM:** Nice

 **BT:** petty. I like it.

 **S2:** this does not sound like a win-win situation.

 **S4:** He wants me to come help him and Mr. Wilson pick out the worst ones ever and then I’m supposed to come over and hug them and pretend they’re super nice.

 **SM:** lolololol

 **S4:** Thor’s helping. He said he’s ‘procuring a prized rooster’ for us.

 **D2:** what makes it prized? My neighbors had chickens when I was a kid.

 **S2:** I’m sorry WHAT

 **D2:** yeah

 **S3:** I thought you grew up in Hells Kitchen, dave?

 **D2:** oh no. I definitely did.

 **DD:** chickens?

 **D2:** do you remember hearing em?

 **DD:** that was your building?

 **D2:** unfortunately

 **DD:** They screamed. All night. They were nocturnal I swear to god.

 **D2:** yeah so my neighbors built a coop for them on the fire escape and then set off a couple of feet in the house for them when it got too cold. They just let ‘em wander the building too. Sometimes, someone would get off on the 6th floor and a chicken would just get in the elevator with us.

 **DD:** I am speechless. Not even I could have swung that one around in a court of law.

 **SM:** I’m telling May that we need chickens

 **S3:** Spidey no

 **BT:** can we have chickens Boss?

 **DD:** Sure. Hazel will eat them immediately

 **S2:** oh my god

 **S4:** oh my god!! No, Hazel!! Bad!!

 **DD:** we should take her to a farm and see what she does

 **BT:** boss no

 **DD:** Maybe Tues would like a chicken

 **SM:** GIVE. TUESDAY. A. FRIEND.

 **DD:** I did. I gave her a sister. She’s never forgiven me.

 **D2:** ahahaha

 **D2:** side note: there’s a gal in a cat suit swinging around writing your name on buildings Spidey

 **SM:** what

 **SM:** oh

 **SM:** no

 **DD:** Is that who I think it is peter?

 **SM:** I’m texting her now oh my god

 **S2:** ??

 **S3:** ???

 **S4:** Oh yeah!! I guess someone called the Avengers in to come deal with that but Mr. Wilson just laughed at his phone and said that it wasn’t his problem. He said she’s called Black Cat?

 **SM:** oh my god girl whyyyyyy

 **S2:** Wait you know the Black Cat?

 **S3:** Is this another Gwen Stacy thing? Did you date this girl too?

 **S2:** Spidey we are literally watching you right now. You cannot ignore this. I’m going to say something to Wade if you don’t.

 **S4:** ew why do you gotta date everyone spidey

 **S2:** spidey

 **SM:** don’t tell Wade

 **S2:** that’s what I thought

 **DD:** this is the gal he hates yes?

 **SM:** oh my god don’t tell Wade please

 **S2:** DO tell Red

 **DD: [voice message]** I remember now. this is the one that MJ hated too. Kate remembers her. She has unkind things to say.

 **SM:** she is a good person

 **SM:** she wants to be a good person. She has it in her.

 **DD: [voice message]** Sure, she does. Just like Elektra does.

 **S2:** OH MY GOD RED. TELL US EVERYTHING.

 **SM:** oh my god don’t say that I’m not you

 **DD: [voice message]** don’t know kiddo you sure make a lot of my own mistakes

 **BT:** That’s just your aura, teach. I make all your bad mistakes these days too

 **S2:** ^ lololol

“What are you all giggling at?” Barton asked over his shoulder.

Spidey slammed himself against the window.

Barton cocked his head. His phone pinged and he turned back to look at it. Then gasped.

“ _Peter_ ,” he said.

“I’m texting her right now, it’s fine,” Spidey moaned.

“The empire state, man. The empire state,” Barton said in awe more than anything else. “Kate’s losing her shit.”

“What’s happening now?” Mr. Nelson asked.

Wade took out his phone. Spidey lunged over the seatback to steal it. Wade blinked at his empty hands then slowly, slowly looked back to Spidey hoarding the thing to his chest.

“Oh, okay,” he said.

“It’s fine, it’s cool, we’re—”

Spidey’s phone chirped. He scrambled to get it out with Wade’s still clutched in his hand.

“Ah, see? Totally fine,” he said, handing Wade’s phone back to him without looking up from his own. “Told her I was out of the state and she says she’ll lay off until I get back into it. No harm, no foul.”

“Who’s ‘she?’” Mr. Nelson asked over his shoulder.

“A friend,” Spidey said.

Dude.

“A friend?” Mr. Nelson repeated.

“Just a friend,” Spidey confirmed anxiously.

Barton snorted.

Wade put an arm over the head rest to turn all the way around and stare Spidey into submission. Spidey shielded his face with his hands and wriggled down as far into the seat as the seatbelt would allow.

“Do I know this friend?” he asked pointedly.

“No,” Spidey squeaked.

“Really now? Are you sure? I’m getting mixed signals here in a familiar kind of way.”

Spidey refused to look him in the eye.

“Peter,” Wade said evenly. “I know you ain’t still got Black Cat’s number in your phone.”

Spidey mumbled something unintelligible. Wade didn’t turn back around.

“If you get to text her, then I get to text her,” he said.

“Oh my god, Wade, no,” Spidey whimpered. “It’s fine. We aren’t a thing anymore. We talked it out.”

Wade’s expression began a waltz into faux surprise.

“Oh, did you?” he asked. “Was this before or after the gaslighting?”

“Wade, don’t. It’s—”

“I’m _just_ askin’, Pete. You know. Just tryin’ to get my timelines right here—”

“It’s fine. She didn’t mean it like that—”

“Oh, so now she didn’t, did she? Man, it’s so hard to keep track because of all the _lying_ , you know?”

Spidey covered his face with his hands.

Wade waited expectantly. Not really for an answer apparently, just to make a point.

Angel did not envy Spidey at the moment.

“I shoulda told you,” Spidey mumbled.

Wade huffed and turned around.

“Wade, I’m sorry,” Spidey said.

Wade cold-shouldered him. He tapped Ellie’s shoulder and took off her borrowed headphones to tell her that it was time to practice reading. Ellie was a little surprised but game. She wanted to read about dinosaurs.

“Wade,” Spidey whined. “I said I’m sorry. And she really has changed since then.”

Nothing.

Damn.

Spidey sighed and flopped back in his seat. Wade started reading pointedly about a little green dinosaur who’d gotten left behind by his herd. Sam bared his teeth at Angel to convey an awkwardness that she shared.

They stopped about forty minutes from home. The dogs wanted running. The child needed to pee. Spidey had to go make an awkward phone call, first to Black Cat, then a follow-up one to MJ and Ned who had apparently seen Black Cat’s messaging and were demanding to know if Spidey had been seeing her while he was seeing them.

He said that he hadn’t been. It had been months since he’d seen her last, apparently.

Louis watched that happening and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Relationships aren’t worth it,” he decided.

“Relationships are totally worth it,” Kate corrected as she passed by after America to go chat with Mr. Nelson.

“Jury’s out,” Sam said. “I’m living a labels-free lifestyle at the moment.”

Angel studied him.

“Define labels-free,” she said.

“A kind way of saying ‘I fuck ‘em and leave ‘em’,” Sam told her.

“You fuck Spidey?” Angel asked.

Louis wasn’t fast enough to get hands over her face this time.

Sam wasn’t fucking Spidey, he claimed. Red inserted himself into that conversation to state that he was never fucking Spidey if he could help it.

Sam told him to fuck off out of his business.

Red told him to watch his mouth.

It was amazing how quickly those two fell into standoffs. Spidey came back looking stretched thin but he paused when he caught sight of these other two and their locked horns.

“Do you two ever get along?” he asked.

They snapped out of it.

“What do you mean?” Sam asked. “I love this guy.”

“Love is strong word,” Red said, “But he is not insufferable.”

Spidey stared between them.

“So is this you both admitting that you’re father and—”

“THINGS TO DO,” Red announced, abandoning them all to go snatch Hazel up as she passed by, as if holding a dog meant he couldn’t hear or talk anymore.

Sam grimaced.

“Too much,” he told Spidey firmly. “Too much.”

Spidey lifted an eyebrow at him.

“So that’s a ‘yes, but we don’t talk about it?’” he asked.

“This person is insinuating that you and I are fucking,” Sam redirected, pointing at Angel.

Spidey turned to her. She held his eye.

“Are we fucking?” he asked Sam. “If we are, then I can add you to the list of people I am apparently fucking all the time, every day of the week, behind my partners’ backs.”

Woah. Yikes.

“Too close,” Louis sighed quietly while Sam tried to figure out what to say to that, “Too close.”

It was forty minutes home.

They got back and took an hour to relax before going back out to unpack the cars.

Angel’s job was to keep Ellie from running down the steps and becoming a safety hazard. It was hard work. The child refused to stay occupied and instead sprinted to meet every single person as they came in from outside.

Angel decided that the answer to this was cooking. She asked Mr. Nelson if he minded if they made cookies.

He did not. He pointed her towards the pantry.

Ellie’s attention was had. She attached herself to Angel’s hip and watched from the edge of the counter as tubs and jars of powdered substances came down onto them.

“Go wash your hands really, super good,” Angel told her.

The child was occupied and chatty, sitting at the table, arranging mini-chocolate chips into the tops of the handful of plain cookies that Angel had saved for her.

Wade came in and was presented with these. He said that they were very cool and would be even cooler with sprinkles.

Ellie nearly fell out of her chair to get over to Angel with sad puppy eyes.

“You gotta go ask Mr. Nelson,” Angel said. “I dunno where the sprinkles are.”

Ellie found Sam first.

Sam didn’t know what sprinkles were. He repeated the word back to her about four times before Angel offered him an example.

He’d forgotten the word in English was all. He knew it in Mandarin. Angel felt that.

“Sorry, bubs, I don’t think we have any,” Sam said down to Ellie’s disappointed face. “But you know who might?”

“YOU LEFT ME.”

Red covered his ears and hissed in the hallway. Kate sat up bolt right on the floor where she had been resting and lavishing attention on Tuesday.

“Is that Kirsten?” she asked.

“Matthew, you _left_ me; you both left me,” Ms. McDuffie lamented as Red poked his head down the hallway to glare at the source of the shouting.

Mr. Nelson valiantly tried to escape Ms. McDuffie’s dramatic arms wrapped around his neck, but she just slumped against him. He swore as they both stumbled.

“Kirsten, help me out here,” Mr. Nelson said.

“I can’t, I’m wounded,” Ms. McDuffie said without batting an eye.

“Kirsten!”

Ms. McDuffie suddenly found her feet.

“Sammy?” she asked.

Sam popped his head out from the kitchen with Ellie on his back.

“Did you bring ‘em?” he asked.

“I brought ‘em,” Ms. McDuffie said, abandoning Mr. Nelson to dig through her purse. “Here, I’ve got purple and purple and…purple…um. And green! And…purple.”

Sam stared while Ellie cheered.

“Kirsten,” Sam said.

“So I ordered this beginner’s kit, right?” Ms. McDuffie said.

“Kirsten.”

“And it was online and it was all ‘choose your colors!’ But there was only one box, you know? So I put in purple and it disappeared? So I put it in again? And again?”

Sam’s face said that this was the not the first time something like this had happened.

“So you bought eight cake kits,” he said.

There was a pause.

“I am so prepared,” Ms. McDuffie said. “Next church bake-sale’s not gonna catch this girl out in the cold.”

“I love you,” Sam said as Ellie scrambled off his back and came over to receive a metric fuckload of plastic sprinkle shakers.

Ms. McDuffie was happy to play along with Ellie. A lot of ‘wows!’ and ‘woahs!’ were heard from the kitchen.

Barton whispered at Red seriously for a while, pointing back towards it before Red socked him in the arm and started whispering back in a threatening kind of way.

“I think we’re gonna head back soon,” Kate said to the rest of them. “There’s a hot pot place on Taraval that we want to hit up.”

She got up with America and gave everyone hugs before leaving them to go put an end to the weird, violent discussion happening over with Red and Barton. America hugged Angel and smelled just as floral as the time before.

“Have a great rest of your trip,” she said. “And be safe getting home.”

If that’s what she wanted, Angel would make it happen.

She moved on to hugging Louis, and then Spidey super tight, telling him that one of these days, she was getting him to move out west. He told her that he loved her, but he would rather choke and he was rewarded for this with a laugh.

Rude.

Angel could make people laugh, too.

Louis told her her envy was showing.

The Hawkeye team left. Wade said that after cookies, he and Ellie were off for a while, too, he had a guy he was visiting a little north of there in the East Bay. He didn’t say why he was visiting this guy and no one asked him. That was kind of how Wade worked.

Wade let Ellie have two whole cookies before he sent her off to go get her tiny blue Captain America duffle bag. He said he’d see them all back in the city.

The house was much quieter now without Wade, Ellie, and the Hawkeye crew. Mr. Nelson seemed relieved for this.

“She’s a handful,” he told Red, referring to Ellie.

“I can still go out and find you one like her if you want one so bad,” Red offered.

Mr. Nelson flat-faced him. He didn’t respond to that.

“Or another plant?” Red offered instead.

The whole window-sill of the kitchen was filled with pots of many shapes and sizes with orchids of all colors bursting out of them. A couple of these had even made their way out of that little alcove and onto the counter and into the hall and all around the living room where the dogs lounged.

Mr. Nelson didn’t need any more plants.

“Or a puppy?” Red offered brightly.

He had Sam’s immediate attention.

“You’re trouble,” Mr. Nelson said. “I’m decompressing. The rest of you are welcome to do as you want. Golden Gate Park’s right behind us and if you go east, then south, there’s a nice little street of places to hang.”

Angel looked over to Spidey and Louis.

“Sam and I have movies to watch,” Spidey said. “You two can do whatever you want. Tomorrow we’ll go to the Baths, I think, and then maybe go down to the bridge while all these guys are at work if that’s okay with y’all.”

The Daredevil folks thought that that was a good plan. In the meantime, they were going to put on _A League of Their Own_ , which Red tried to pretend he didn’t actually care about.

It was cool.

Way chiller than Angel was used to.

But, she thought, if this was how traveling worked as you got older—if spending a night in watching movies with friends was what you did with your friends across the country when you visited—then she thought she could get used to it.

Not that Bitsy could ever know that.

She sent him all the selfies that their group had taken over the weekend to make sure that he knew what he was missing. He sent back a single picture of him holding a green rooster.

“I see your camping trip and I raise you a King,” he wrote. And damn.

That was pretty good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that concludes this weekend trip to the mountains.  
> (Sorry y'all, I just needed to wrap this up real quick so that I could focus on other things.) 
> 
> Thank you all for reading and commenting! Your comments make me laugh all the time and your joy brings me joy ❤❤❤ Thanks very much to those readers who gave kudos too. It all helps big time in keeping me motivated to the end!


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